Hiring Database Administrators: The Complete Guide

# Database Administrator

**Location:** Chicago, IL (Hybrid - 2 days/week in office) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is a fintech platform powering payment processing and financial analytics for mid-market businesses.

We handle 2.3 million transactions daily across 12,000+ merchants, with strict requirements for data integrity, low latency, and regulatory compliance. Our databases are the backbone of everything we do—processing $4.2 billion in monthly transaction volume.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Own critical database infrastructure that processes millions of financial transactions
- Join a 75-person engineering team with a dedicated 4-person Data Infrastructure group
- Series C funded ($80M from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures)
- Modern database stack: PostgreSQL for OLTP, MySQL for legacy systems, Aurora for cloud workloads

## The Role

We're hiring a Senior Database Administrator to ensure the performance, reliability, and security of our database infrastructure. This isn't a "run backups and respond to tickets" role—you'll be a database engineer who optimizes query performance, architects database solutions, and builds automation that makes databases self-service for developers.

You'll work closely with our backend engineers to optimize data models, with our platform team to automate database provisioning, and with security to maintain PCI-DSS compliance. The ideal candidate thinks of databases as infrastructure to be engineered, not just systems to be operated.

**The database infrastructure you'll own:**

- 8 PostgreSQL clusters (primary: 4TB, 50K queries/second peak)
- 3 MySQL clusters (legacy payment systems, migration planned)
- 5 Aurora PostgreSQL instances on AWS
- 2 Redis clusters for caching and session management
- Daily backup volumes: 12TB with point-in-time recovery requirements
- 99.99% availability SLA for payment-critical databases

## Objectives of This Role

- Reduce average query latency by 40% through index optimization and query tuning within first 6 months
- Lead MySQL to PostgreSQL migration for legacy payment systems (timeline: 12 months)
- Implement automated failover testing with monthly chaos engineering exercises
- Build self-service database provisioning that reduces dev environment setup from 2 days to 30 minutes
- Establish database change management process integrated with CI/CD pipelines

## Responsibilities

- Optimize database performance through query analysis, index tuning, and configuration optimization
- Design and execute backup strategies with point-in-time recovery and disaster recovery testing
- Plan and execute database migrations with zero-downtime deployment strategies
- Implement database security controls including encryption, access management, and audit logging
- Monitor database health using Datadog, pganalyze, and custom alerting
- Automate database operations using Terraform, Ansible, and Python scripts
- Manage database capacity planning and scaling strategies (read replicas, connection pooling)
- Respond to database incidents and conduct root cause analysis
- Document database architectures, runbooks, and operational procedures
- Collaborate with developers on schema design and query optimization
- Maintain PCI-DSS compliance for databases handling payment data

## Required Skills and Qualifications

- 5+ years of database administration experience with production PostgreSQL
- Expert-level SQL skills: query optimization, execution plans, index strategies
- Experience with MySQL administration and PostgreSQL migration paths
- Strong understanding of database internals: MVCC, WAL, vacuum, replication
- Production experience with cloud databases (AWS RDS, Aurora)
- Proficiency in scripting for automation (Python, Bash)
- Experience with database monitoring and performance analysis tools
- Knowledge of backup strategies, disaster recovery, and high availability patterns
- Understanding of database security: encryption at rest/in transit, access controls, audit logging

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Familiarity with Redis or other caching systems
- Background in financial services or payment processing (PCI-DSS experience)
- Experience with database connection pooling (PgBouncer, ProxySQL)
- Knowledge of PostgreSQL extensions (pg_stat_statements, pg_repack, TimescaleDB)
- Experience with database CI/CD tools (Flyway, Liquibase, pgLoader)
- Familiarity with Kubernetes database operators

## Tech Stack

- **Primary Databases:** PostgreSQL 15, MySQL 8.0, Aurora PostgreSQL
- **Caching:** Redis 7.0, ElastiCache
- **Cloud Platform:** AWS (RDS, Aurora, EC2)
- **Infrastructure as Code:** Terraform, Ansible
- **Monitoring:** Datadog, pganalyze, CloudWatch, PagerDuty
- **Automation:** Python, Bash, pg_cron
- **Connection Pooling:** PgBouncer, ProxySQL
- **Migration Tools:** pgLoader, AWS DMS, Flyway
- **Backup:** pgBackRest, AWS automated backups, WAL archiving to S3

## On-Call

This role includes on-call responsibilities. Database issues can be business-critical, especially for payment processing systems.

**What on-call looks like:**

- Rotating weekly schedule shared among 4 team members (roughly 1 week per month)
- Average of 2-3 pages per on-call week, most resolved within 30 minutes
- Clear runbooks for common issues; escalation paths for complex problems
- On-call compensation: $500/week stipend plus comp time for after-hours incidents
- No expectation to be on-call during the first 60 days while you ramp up

**Our commitment:** We invest heavily in automation and alerting to minimize false positives and toil. If you're getting paged too often, we fix the underlying issue—not just the symptoms.

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $130,000 - $170,000 (based on experience and skills)

**Equity:** 0.03% - 0.08% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered for employees, 75% for dependents)
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- $2,000 annual professional development budget
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- 12 weeks paid parental leave
- Database conference attendance (PGConf, Percona Live) sponsored annually
- Flexible hybrid schedule (2 days in Chicago office, 3 days remote)

**Location:** Chicago, IL (Hybrid). Remote considered for candidates in Central or Eastern time zones.

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2-3 weeks. We focus on database engineering skills and problem-solving, not memorizing obscure syntax.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min) - Background, interests, and role expectations.

- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min) - SQL fundamentals, database concepts, and discussion of your past database projects.

- **Step 3: SQL Performance Challenge** (90 min) - Analyze slow queries, examine execution plans, and propose optimizations. We provide a test database—no trick questions, just real-world performance problems.

- **Step 4: Database Design & Operations** (60 min) - Discuss backup strategies, migration planning, and how you'd architect database infrastructure for our use case.

- **Step 5: Team & Culture** (45 min) - Meet 2 team members from Platform and Backend engineering.

- **Step 6: Hiring Manager** (30 min) - Career goals, on-call expectations, and final questions.

You'll receive feedback within 3 business days of each round.

## How to Apply

Submit your resume. If you have examples of database optimizations, automation scripts, or architecture decisions you're proud of, we'd love to hear about them in your cover letter.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We're committed to building a diverse team and inclusive culture. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.*

*Great database engineering comes from diverse perspectives. If you're excited about this role but don't meet every qualification, we encourage you to apply. If you need accommodations during the interview process, let us know and we'll make it work.*