Database Administrator Role

OpenDataJobs•Washington, DC

About The Position

The work Database Administrators keep database services available, recoverable, secure, observable, and appropriately sized. They manage the operational conditions under which database code and data run, from configuration and capacity to backups, upgrades, replication, and incident response. The role includes establishing recovery procedures, testing restores and failover, monitoring workload health, investigating contention and resource pressure, coordinating patches, and administering privileged access. Performance work is evidence-based: Database Administrators connect application behavior, query plans, configuration, data growth, and infrastructure signals before changing a production system. Managed database services automate parts of installation, patching, backups, scaling, and high availability, but they do not eliminate operational ownership. Teams still need people to set policy, configure services, validate recovery, tune workloads, manage access, plan version upgrades, interpret monitoring, and respond when service behavior does not match expectations. What you may build Monitoring, alerting, health checks, capacity forecasts, and operational dashboards. Backup, restore, replication, failover, and disaster-recovery procedures with tested evidence. Database configuration baselines, maintenance automation, patch plans, and upgrade runbooks. Privileged-access controls, role administration, encryption configurations, and audit support. Performance investigations and remediation plans spanning queries, indexes, configuration, storage, and compute.

Requirements

Production administration experience with one or more relational database engines or managed database services.
Hands-on knowledge of monitoring, performance diagnosis, capacity management, backups, restores, replication, and high availability.
Experience planning patches, major-version upgrades, maintenance windows, rollback paths, and disaster-recovery tests.
Understanding of database access control, privileged operations, encryption, audit needs, and security hardening.
Scripting or automation skills for repeatable maintenance, evidence collection, health checks, and operational response.
Methodical when systems are healthy and steady when they are not.
Prepares for failure before it happens, keeps operational evidence current.
Makes careful production changes, communicates risk and service impact clearly.
Works well with developers, architects, security teams, cloud platform teams, and service owners.
Knows when to automate a repeatable task and when a change needs human review.

Nice To Haves

PostgreSQL
Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle Database
Amazon Relational Database Service
Azure SQL
Experience with workloads that support artificial intelligence (AI), including vector indexes, bursty retrieval traffic, new retention patterns, or sensitive interaction data.

Responsibilities

Keep database services available, recoverable, secure, observable, and appropriately sized.
Manage operational conditions for database code and data, including configuration, capacity, backups, upgrades, replication, and incident response.
Establish recovery procedures, test restores and failover.
Monitor workload health and investigate contention and resource pressure.
Coordinate patches and administer privileged access.
Connect application behavior, query plans, configuration, data growth, and infrastructure signals before changing a production system.
Set policy, configure services, validate recovery, tune workloads, manage access, plan version upgrades, interpret monitoring, and respond to service behavior issues.
Build monitoring, alerting, health checks, capacity forecasts, and operational dashboards.
Develop backup, restore, replication, failover, and disaster-recovery procedures with tested evidence.
Create database configuration baselines, maintenance automation, patch plans, and upgrade runbooks.
Implement privileged-access controls, role administration, encryption configurations, and audit support.
Conduct performance investigations and develop remediation plans for queries, indexes, configuration, storage, and compute.