Senior Database Administrator – Microsoft SQL Server & PostgreSQL

Role Purpose

The Senior Database Administrator will own database reliability, availability, performance, security, recoverability, and operational standards across Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL environments.

This is a hands-on senior role for someone who can design and build database environments from scratch, troubleshoot complex production issues, guide clients and infrastructure partners, and establish consistent operational practices across projects.

The successful candidate must be capable of taking end-to-end ownership—from architecture and installation through monitoring, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, maintenance, production support, and continuous improvement.

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Primary Responsibilities

1. Microsoft SQL Server Architecture and Implementation

• Design, install, configure, patch, upgrade, and maintain enterprise SQL Server environments.

• Build SQL Server environments from the ground up, including instance configuration, storage layout, service accounts, ports, security, memory allocation, CPU settings, tempdb, and operational jobs.

• Design and implement Windows Server Failover Clustering and SQL Server Always On Availability Groups.

• Configure and troubleshoot availability replicas, synchronization modes, quorum, failover policies, endpoints, and Availability Group listeners.

• Define listener, DNS, IP, subnet, firewall, load-balancing, routing, and application-connectivity requirements with client infrastructure teams.

• Design multi-site, disaster-recovery, and read-only workload-routing solutions.

• Plan and execute controlled failover and disaster-recovery exercises.

• Support standalone, clustered, virtualized, on-premises, cloud, and hybrid SQL Server deployments.

• Conduct health checks and configuration comparisons across database nodes to identify inconsistencies in patch levels, memory, parallelism, storage, tempdb, and other settings.

2. SQL Server Performance Monitoring and Optimization

• Establish proactive monitoring for expensive, long-running, blocking, high-CPU, high-I/O, and high-memory queries.

• Use Query Store, execution plans, Extended Events, DMVs, wait statistics, blocking and deadlock analysis, and other diagnostic capabilities to identify performance bottlenecks.

• Analyze execution plans for poor cardinality estimates, memory-grant problems, spills, scans, expensive sorts, hash operations, spools, parameter sensitivity, and inefficient parallelism.

• Troubleshoot sustained CPU, memory, storage, and transaction-log pressure and distinguish infrastructure-capacity problems from query, schema, or configuration problems.

• Investigate abnormal tempdb growth and determine whether consumption is caused by user objects, internal objects, version-store activity, query spills, index operations, or long-running transactions.

• Configure and maintain tempdb based on workload requirements, including file count, equal file sizing, initial sizing, autogrowth, disk placement, and capacity thresholds.

• Diagnose blocking, deadlocks, latch contention, excessive waits, failed jobs, slow transactions, and database connectivity issues.

• Recommend and validate query rewrites, indexing changes, statistics updates, configuration changes, and resource-capacity improvements.

• Establish performance baselines and capacity forecasts for database growth, CPU, memory, IOPS, storage, transaction logs, and backup requirements.

• Work with application teams to prevent recurring heavy-query and high-DML performance problems rather than relying on restarts, shrinking, or additional infrastructure as temporary workarounds.

3. Indexing, Fragmentation and Statistics Management

• Design and implement database maintenance jobs for index optimization, statistics updates, integrity checks, backups, cleanup, and operational reporting.

• Establish workload-appropriate thresholds for index reorganization, rebuilds, and statistics updates rather than applying uniform rules to every database.

• Analyze rapidly recurring fragmentation, page splits, wide-table design, clustering-key selection, fill factor, index usage, and high-DML access patterns.

• Tune fill factor selectively for frequently modified indexes while evaluating the storage, cache, and I/O trade-offs.

• Review duplicate, overlapping, unused, missing, and excessively wide indexes.

• Plan index-maintenance windows that minimize blocking, replication impact, transaction-log growth, Availability Group latency, and production disruption.

• Measure the business and query-performance impact of fragmentation rather than treating the fragmentation percentage alone as the success criterion.

4. Table Partitioning and Data Lifecycle Management

• Design, implement, and maintain table and index partitioning strategies for large and high-volume databases.

• Define appropriate partition keys, functions, schemes, filegroups, boundaries, and retention models.

• Implement sliding-window strategies, partition switching, archival, purging, and future-partition creation.

• Perform partition-level index and statistics maintenance where appropriate.

• Ensure aligned indexes and validate the impact of partitioning on query plans, replication, backups, storage, and operational jobs.

• Review existing partitioned tables to confirm that partition elimination is occurring and that the implementation provides measurable operational or performance value.

• Coordinate partition changes carefully for high-DML and replicated tables.

5. Backup, Recovery and Disaster Recovery

• Define backup and recovery strategies based on agreed Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives.

• Implement and monitor full, differential, transaction-log, copy-only, and PostgreSQL physical or logical backups as appropriate.

• Configure backup encryption, compression, retention, off-site storage, cleanup, alerting, and access controls.

• Regularly test restores and maintain evidence that databases can be recovered within agreed targets.

• Prepare documented recovery procedures for database corruption, accidental deletion, infrastructure failure, Availability Group failure, and site-level disaster.

• Validate transaction-log chains, backup integrity, recovery models, point-in-time recovery, and backup-storage capacity.

• Ensure backup success is not treated as proof of recoverability without periodic restoration testing.

6. PostgreSQL Administration

• Design, install, configure, upgrade, patch, and maintain PostgreSQL database environments.

• Build and maintain highly available PostgreSQL clusters using streaming replication and suitable cluster-management or failover technologies.

• Configure primary and standby nodes, replication slots, WAL management, synchronous or asynchronous replication, connection routing, and failover procedures.

• Understand and administer technologies such as Patroni, etcd/Consul, repmgr, pgBouncer, HAProxy, or equivalent solutions.

• Implement PostgreSQL backup and point-in-time recovery using appropriate technologies such as pgBackRest, Barman, native utilities, or approved enterprise tools.

• Monitor replication lag, WAL growth, connection consumption, locks, long-running transactions, checkpoint behavior, table and index bloat, storage growth, and database health.

• Tune PostgreSQL configuration parameters based on workload, memory, CPU, storage, concurrency, and recovery requirements.

• Analyze slow queries using pg_stat_statements, EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE, PostgreSQL logs, wait events, and relevant monitoring tools.

• Manage VACUUM, autovacuum, ANALYZE, REINDEX, statistics, bloat, and routine maintenance.

• Administer PostgreSQL roles, permissions, authentication, TLS, certificates, auditing, and security hardening.

• Plan and test PostgreSQL failover, switchover, recovery, major-version upgrades, and rollback procedures.

7. Database Security and Compliance

• Establish secure database configuration standards for SQL Server and PostgreSQL.

• Implement least-privilege access, role-based permissions, privileged-account controls, password and authentication standards, and periodic access reviews.

• Configure and support encryption at rest and encryption in transit, including certificate lifecycle and expiry monitoring.

• Work with application teams to validate encrypted connection settings, driver compatibility, listener certificates, and certificate trust.

• Support database auditing, security reviews, vulnerability remediation, and regulatory evidence requirements.

• Maintain secure service accounts, database links, linked servers, replication accounts, backup credentials, and monitoring accounts.

• Ensure database credentials and other secrets are managed through approved secret-management solutions.

8. Replication, Integration and Connectivity

• Configure, monitor, and troubleshoot SQL Server transactional replication and other approved data-distribution mechanisms.

• Assess the effect of schema, index, and partitioning changes on replicated databases.

• Diagnose replication latency, agent failures, data inconsistencies, transaction-log growth, and subscriber performance.

• Troubleshoot database logins, drivers, connection strings, DNS, listener routing, firewall rules, TLS trust, and connection-pooling problems.

• Maintain an inventory of applications, jobs, monitoring systems, linked servers, reporting services, batch processes, and other database clients.

9. Client and Partner Technical Leadership

• Act as the senior database authority for internal teams, implementation partners, and client infrastructure teams.

• Define minimum standards and reference architectures for production, non-production, high-availability, and disaster-recovery database environments.

• Review database designs proposed by clients or partners and identify availability, performance, security, capacity, backup, and supportability risks.

• Provide clear build guides, configuration baselines, maintenance standards, monitoring requirements, backup policies, and operational runbooks.

• Challenge unsafe designs and incomplete implementations using technical evidence and business-impact analysis.

• Lead technical workshops covering cluster architecture, listener configuration, failover, backups, monitoring, maintenance, partitioning, security, and recovery.

• Guide less-experienced DBAs and provide structured knowledge transfer to support and delivery teams.

• Take ownership of complex database incidents through diagnosis, remediation, root-cause analysis, and permanent corrective action.

Operational Ownership