Database Administrator

Description

You will carry out day-to-day database administration across several database management systems, including MariaDB and PostgreSQL.

The company specialises in running complex public sector IT projects. Its work covers systems integration, informatics and analytics, solution implementation and program management, with teams working in software development, data science, security, machine learning, cloud and mobile.

The company was acquired by a larger consulting firm in July 2024.

Responsibilities

• Deploy database servers and databases, including installing, configuring, patching and upgrading them.
• Administer databases on virtual machines, such as VMware, and the Linux operating systems beneath them, including Red Hat and CentOS.
• Administer databases running in containers, including on Kubernetes.
• Enforce data security and protection policies by managing database access and auditing access to sensitive databases in line with procedures and regulations.
• Handle incidents through structured processes that detect, diagnose and resolve outages quickly, restoring availability and protecting data integrity. Manage them in ServiceNow.
• Plan, validate and deploy new databases and changes into pre-production and production with minimal downtime and no data loss, following controlled processes.
• Monitor databases, operating systems and servers by defining and managing metrics, checking error logs, system and database events, disk space and storage, using SCOM to spot, prevent and fix problems.
• Schedule and monitor maintenance jobs covering backups, integrity checks, index maintenance and statistics updates.
• Define and schedule backup plans and strategy, ensure data can be restored, integrate database backups with NetBackup and manage data retention.
• Track performance metrics for database systems and operating systems with SolarWinds DPA. Analyse data access patterns and query plans, and tune queries.
• Configure and monitor high availability and disaster recovery using Galera, MaxScale and data replication to meet SLAs.
• Build DevOps pipelines with Puppet, Azure DevOps and Flyway to deploy database changes to production.
• Write and schedule automation scripts in Bash, Puppet, Python and PowerShell for repetitive tasks.
• Design, reverse engineer and document conceptual and physical database models. Write and update standard operating procedures.
• Implement database changes and releases in production and other environments in line with standards and procedures.
• Work with development, architecture, applications, security, networks and service management teams to troubleshoot and resolve problems. Present opposing views to stakeholders and help reach compromise.
• Train internal teams and hand over knowledge so they can handle routine tasks independently.
• Respond promptly to incident and change tickets assigned in the ITSM tool. Follow up, prioritise, and resolve them within set timeframes and SLAs.

Requirements

• Mandatory: Bachelor degree plus 9 years of IT experience.
• Mandatory: Command of English at B2 level or above.
• Mandatory: At least 8 years of systems administration in complex enterprise environments, managing large scale general ICT systems.
• Mandatory: At least 6 years of database administration for mission critical production databases holding sensitive data in high-security environments.
• Mandatory: At least 5 years of database administration with MariaDB or MySQL.
• Mandatory: At least 5 years of experience with PostgreSQL.
• Mandatory: At least 2 years of database administration with Kubernetes.
• Mandatory: This experience must come from on-premise, air-gapped environments.
• Mandatory: Knowledge of containerised environments, including databases, stateful datasets and persistent storage volumes.
• Mandatory: Knowledge of high availability and disaster recovery in containerised environments.
• Mandatory: Knowledge of performance monitoring, analysis and optimisation for databases in containerised environments.
• Mandatory: Knowledge of conceptual and physical data modelling, data model normalisation and Entity-Attribute-Relationship design.
• Mandatory: Knowledge of complex enterprise architectures and advanced ICT solution designs, including microservices.
• Mandatory: Knowledge of ITIL processes for managing complex IT environments.
• Desirable: At least 2 years working with public or hybrid cloud services on Azure or AWS.
• Desirable: At least 3 years of database administration with high availability and disaster recovery technologies, clustering solutions, HAProxy, Patroni, Galera and MaxScale.
• Desirable: Database administration experience with Neo4J, Milvus, MongoDB or Cassandra.
• Desirable: Experience working with VMware virtualisation.
• Desirable: Database administration experience with Microsoft SQL Server, AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC).
• Desirable: Experience with business intelligence tools covering ETL, OLAP and PowerBI.
• Desirable: Database administration experience across all listed DBMSs and technologies on-premise.
• Desirable: Experience writing scripts and building solutions for DevOps pipelines, automated deployment and database schema versioning, using Puppet, Azure DevOps or TFS, Flyway, Bash, PowerShell or Terraform.
• Desirable: Knowledge of Agile methods for bridging development and operations.
• Desirable: Knowledge of ICT data centres, infrastructure, security, storage, networking and service management.
• Desirable: Knowledge of data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.