Senior Database Administrator

Job Category:
Information Technology

POSITION PURPOSE This is a mixed operational and strategic role that has evolved beyond the traditional core DBA responsibilities. In addition to owning core DBA responsibilities, the Senior DBA will help drive modernization initiatives that improve reliability, security, performance, and governance across the enterprise data platform.

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Database installation & configuration:
  Deploy and configure SQL Server instances across clustered, standalone, and Azure environments.
• Performance monitoring & tuning:
  Monitor SQL Server health, analyze query execution plans, optimize indexes, and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks across OLTP and analytical workloads.
• T-SQL development & optimization:
  Write, review, and optimize complex queries, stored procedures, and scripts for performance and scalability.
• Backup & recovery management:
  Design and maintain backup strategies (full, differential, transaction log), perform regular restore tests, and ensure compliance with RPO/RTO targets.
• High availability & disaster recovery:
  Implement and maintain HA/DR solutions including Always On Availability Groups, replication, and failover clustering.
• Security & compliance:
  Enforce database security standards, manage roles and permissions, implement encryption (TDE, Always Encrypted), and maintain audit readiness.
• Job scheduling & automation:
  Manage SQL Agent jobs, resolve scheduling conflicts, and develop automation using Power Shell and T-SQL.
• Capacity, patch & upgrade management:
  Monitor disk and compute utilization, forecast growth, apply cumulative updates and service packs, coordinate version upgrades, and validate changes in lower environments.
• Documentation & standards:
  Maintain runbooks, configuration documentation, and operational standards.
• On-call support:
  Provide 24/7 coverage for critical production systems, responding promptly to alerts and incidents.
• Strategic Modernization Leadership:
  Cloud and platform modernization:
  Lead consolidation of legacy SQL Server instances, evaluate workloads for cloud migration (Azure SQL, Managed Instance, Synapse), and optimize licensing posture.
• Synapse and Fabric administration:
  Maintain Azure Synapse IAM, implement row-level security in Microsoft Fabric work spaces, and tune MPP workloads (distribution, partitioning, statistics, workload management).
• Alerting and DR standardization:
  Standardize alerting and paging coverage across critical pipelines, own the enterprise backup strategy, and validate DR plans through scheduled exercises.
• Governance partnership:
  Partner with the data governance team on Microsoft Purview cataloging, lineage, sensitivity labeling, and data dictionary initiatives.
• Standards and automation:
  Drive connection naming standards, infrastructure-as-code adoption for database deployments, and CI/CD pipelines for schema changes.
• Knowledge transfer and mentorship:
  Author DBA runbooks, enforce best practices, and lead structured knowledge-sharing sessions with data engineers and BI developers.

The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability necessary to perform this job.

• Education:
  
  Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field preferred; equivalent hands-on experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.
• Experience:
  
  8 years of experience as a SQL Server DBA in enterprise environments.
• T-SQL:
  Expert-level T-SQL skills for query development, optimization, and troubleshooting.
• Monitoring:
  Experience with monitoring tools and dashboards for observing database health, query performance, and resource utilization.
• Upgrades & migrations:
  Proven ability to upgrade and migrate legacy SQL Server versions (2012/2016) to currently supported releases.
• HA/DR and security:
  Hands-on expertise in HA/DR, performance tuning, and security hardening.
• Lifecycle management:
  Strong knowledge of patching, upgrades, and lifecycle management.
• Azure:
  Working knowledge of Azure SQL and Azure Synapse Analytics.
• Incident tooling:
  Experience with incident and alerting platforms (Pager Duty, Opsgenie, or similar).
• Leadership:
  Proven ability to lead cross-functional projects and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Multi-engine exposure:
  Hands-on experience with Amazon DynamoDB (data modeling, capacity/throughput management, application integration) and/or PostgreSQL or other relational/No
  
  SQL platforms in production.
• Automation and Dev Ops:
  Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management using Ansible and Terraform (Power Shell, SSIS, dbatools, CI/CD for databases).
• Synapse MPP:
  Experience including distribution strategy, partitioning, and workload…