Director, Database Operations

Priority Technology Holdings, LLC•Alpharetta, GA

About The Position

As the Director of Database Operations, you will lead the design, reliability, and operational strategy for the company's mission-critical data infrastructure supporting high-volume payment processing and banking systems. Your focus will be on Microsoft SQL Server and Amazon RDS MySQL/Aurora, ensuring scalability, high availability, low latency, and compliance with financial and data security regulations. You will oversee a team responsible for the 24/7 performance of databases that power transaction processing, reporting, fraud prevention, banking, and reconciliation services.

Requirements

Communication: Clear writing, active listening, and the ability to explain technical topics in plain terms.
Accountability: Track record of delivering quality work, owning outcomes, and learning from setbacks.
Willingness to Learn: Demonstrated adaptability with new frameworks, technologies, or methodologies.
Team Orientation: Experience working collaboratively in agile environments and contributing to shared goals.
Self-Awareness: Openness to feedback, ability to recognize limitations, and willingness to give credit where due.
5+ years of experience in a leadership role over a database or other operations team.
5+ years of experience with supporting or engineering custom software on RDBMS platforms.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred).
Experience in a leadership role within a payments, fintech, or financial services environment.
Expert-level knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server (2016 and newer), including Always On, replication, partitioning, and stored procedure tuning.
Experience with MySQL, Aurora, and Snowflake programming and operations/tuning.
Experience with AWS RDS hosted database services.
Experience with Kafka, Redis, or other data streaming platforms.
Deep understanding of data security, encryption (at rest/in transit), and regulatory compliance (PCI, SOX).
Proven experience operating 24/7 high-availability databases in high-throughput systems (1,000+ TPS).
Hands-on with IaC tools (e.g., CloudFormation, Terraform), scripting (PowerShell, Bash), and database automation.
Certifications: AWS Database Specialty, Microsoft Certified: SQL Server/Azure DBA.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of senior DBAs and database engineers supporting production, staging, and dev/test environments.
Manage database architecture, administration, and operations for MS SQL Server and Amazon RDS Aurora/MySQL in a high-volume, low-latency transaction environment.
Partner with Software Engineering, Security, and DevOps, teams to drive the integration of database reliability into CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure.
Ensure database performance, security, and resilience across all payment systems, including authorization, settlement, chargeback, and risk platforms.
Drive automation of routine operations (e.g., schema deployments, backups, failovers, capacity scaling).
Implement disaster recovery and business continuity strategies, including geographically redundant architectures.
Monitor and tune databases to support high throughput and low-latency transaction workloads, including query optimization and index tuning.
Ensure compliance with PCI DSS, SOX, and other regulatory standards through strong controls, encryption, and access management.
Evaluate and implement database tooling, observability platforms, and performance monitoring (e.g., Splunk, Elastic, DataDog, CloudWatch).
Lead database modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy SQL infrastructure to Aurora or serverless RDS as appropriate.
Own database vendor relationships, SLAs, and budget forecasting for software, cloud services, and infrastructure.