Senior DBA/DBE Consultant

Green Dot•Los Angeles, CA

1d•$134,100 - $201,100•Hybrid

About The Position

Green Dot is seeking a senior database professional to serve as a technical authority on SQL Server internals, performance engineering, and scalability for high-volume financial transaction databases. The role diagnoses production issues and designs durable improvements to latency, stability, and scalability across mission-critical systems supporting authorization, ledger, payments, and account services. It works closely with application engineering, SRE, architecture, and security teams, mentors the internal DBA team, and serves as an escalation point. The position owns outcomes end to end, including diagnosis, measurable improvements, and follow-through. The position is structured hybrid, with at least three days per week in the office and remote work on remaining days; on-site expectations may change to meet business needs. Candidates must reside in an approved location and be flexible to travel for one to two weeks to Miami or Northern California. The role is classified as contractor. The targeted full-time base salary is $134,100 to $201,100 per year; final compensation depends on qualifications, expertise, and geographic location. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without current or future sponsorship.

Requirements

At least 10 years of hands-on SQL Server DBA or database engineering experience.
At least 5 years in a senior- or principal-level performance-focused role.
Expert knowledge of SQL Server 2016–2022 internals.
Proven tuning of large, high-concurrency OLTP systems, including thousands of transactions per second and multi-terabyte databases.
Experience in financial services, payments, or banking.
Demonstrated production resolution of hot-spot, latch, lock, and tempdb contention.
Advanced T-SQL development and execution-plan analysis skills.
Hands-on design and operation of partitioning at scale.
Deep production experience with Always On Availability Groups and SQL Server Replication.
Strong proficiency with Query Store, Extended Events, DMVs, and wait-stats methodology.
Working knowledge of Windows Server, WSFC, SAN/NVMe storage, and virtualization.
PowerShell scripting and automation experience.
Experience working under PCI-DSS, SOX, or similar audit controls.
Strong written communication skills, including RCA reports and executive summaries.
Ability to work in the United States without sponsorship.
Ability to meet the stated location requirement and travel for one to two weeks to Miami or Northern California.

Nice To Haves

Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database, or SQL Server on Azure/AWS VMs.
Cloud performance and cost optimization experience.
In-Memory OLTP and columnstore experience for hybrid workloads.
SQL Server on Linux and containers.
Database DevOps experience with SSDT, Flyway, or Liquibase, as well as CI/CD and automated testing.
Experience with additional platforms such as PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, or Snowflake.
Certifications such as DP-300 (Azure Database Administrator Associate) or MCSE/MCM Data Platform.
Community contributions such as blogs, speaking, or open-source tools.
Experience with dbatools.

Responsibilities

Diagnose complex production issues using SQL Server internals, wait statistics, DMVs, Extended Events, Query Store, and PerfMon counters.
Analyze execution plans at the operator level, including cardinality estimation, memory grants, spills, parallelism, and row goals.
Advise on SQL Server engine configuration, including MAXDOP, cost threshold for parallelism, compatibility levels, database-scoped configurations, and trace flags.
Own performance tuning for latency-sensitive OLTP workloads and resolve parameter sniffing, plan regressions, implicit conversions, and non-SARGable predicates.
Use Query Store and Intelligent Query Processing features for baselining, plan forcing, and regression control.
Govern indexing and statistics strategy, including clustered key design, covering and filtered indexes, columnstore, and maintenance.
Troubleshoot hot spots, including last-page insert, tempdb, and spinlock contention; resolve blocking chains, deadlocks, lock escalation, and isolation-level issues.
Write, refactor, and review high-performance T-SQL, including stored procedures, set-based logic, window functions, and safe dynamic SQL.
Review developer and ORM-generated SQL and publish coding standards and anti-pattern guidance.
Design large data changes, such as purges, backfills, and archival, to run safely online.
Design and operate table and index partitioning for large financial tables, including sliding-window patterns.
Support data lifecycle, archival, compression, and retention in accordance with regulatory requirements.
Design, implement, and troubleshoot Always On Availability Groups; diagnose redo lag, log send queue growth, HADR_SYNC_COMMIT waits, and failover issues.
Design, operate, and troubleshoot transactional and peer-to-peer replication, including latency and data consistency issues.
Validate HA/DR against RTO/RPO targets and lead disaster-recovery tests and failover drills with audit-ready documentation.
Enforce least-privilege access and data-protection controls, including TDE, Always Encrypted, TLS, and SQL Server Audit.
Support audit readiness for PCI-DSS, SOX, GLBA, and FFIEC-aligned controls and follow CAB change management.
Design proactive monitoring and alerting for performance, blocking, AG health, replication, jobs, and capacity.
Build idempotent automation using PowerShell, dbatools, T-SQL, and CI/CD pipelines; identify opportunities for AI-assisted operations, anomaly detection, and self-healing remediation.
Lead or support P1/P2 incidents and produce root-cause analysis reports with corrective and preventive actions.
Establish performance baselines, SLOs, and capacity models, and quantify changes using before-and-after metrics.
Mentor DBAs and developers and present findings to leadership in terms of risk, cost, and business impact.