Senior Database Administrator

Equals Money • Saint George, ME

88d

About The Position

We’re hiring a pragmatic Senior Database Administrator to own the health, performance and reliability of our fleet of ~50 Aurora MySQL clusters. You’ll work closely with engineering to keep systems running smoothly — ensuring backups and alarms are configured, capacity is right-sized, and maintenance windows and failover procedures are tested. Day-to-day you’ll profile and optimise slow queries, review and add indexes, rewrite problematic SQL, and drive performance tuning and schema-change best practices. You’ll also automate routine checks, maintain runbooks for incidents and recovery, and partner with teams to plan migrations, capacity growth and long-term improvements.

Requirements

• Strong practical experience with MySQL / Aurora MySQL administration at production scale (schema design, replication, failover).
• Proven ability to profile and tune queries and indexes (EXPLAIN, slow-query analysis, query rewriting).
• Solid knowledge of backup & recovery strategies for Aurora (snapshots, continuous backups/PITR) and tested restore experience.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting for databases (CloudWatch, Performance Insights, slow-query logs) and acting on alarms.
• Comfortable scripting/automation (Bash, Python, or similar) to build health checks, runbooks and operational tooling; good Linux fundamentals.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with MySQL tooling such as pt-query-digest / Percona Toolkit, ProxySQL, or similar performance/management tools.
• AWS experience or certification (Aurora/RDS internals, KMS for encryption, IAM, multi-AZ/Global DB setups).

Responsibilities

• Monitor cluster health and alerts (CloudWatch / Performance Insights / slow-query), investigate anomalies and act on incidents.
• Diagnose and optimise slow queries and problematic transactions: use EXPLAIN, rewrite queries, and add/remove indexes as needed.
• Ensure backups, snapshots and PITR are configured and tested; maintain and exercise recovery/runbook procedures.
• Perform capacity planning, sizing and maintenance (patches, minor version upgrades, failover drills) to keep performance and availability targets.
• Automate routine checks and reports (index coverage, long-running queries, replica lag, space usage) and produce actionable recommendations for engineering teams.

Benefits

• A competitive salary benchmarked against a peer group.
• 25 days holiday per year + your birthday off.
• Opportunities for progression, development and learning new skills - £250 towards the cost of learning & development.
• Free onsite Nuffield Health gym & pool (London) and discounted gym membership elsewhere.
• GetActive with Aviva - Health and Wellbeing discounts on services and products.
• Interbank currency rates on travel money and international transfers.
• Bupa Private Healthcare.
• Free Eye Test and £50 up to the cost of glasses.
• EAP Service - Mental Health Services.
• Life Assurance Policy - x3 annual salary.
• Contributory pension scheme.
• Cycle to Work Scheme.
• Season Ticket Loans.
• Enhanced Parental Policies.
• Complimentary tea, coffee, soft drinks and fruit.
• We operate a hybrid working arrangement where possible.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 251-500 employees