Database Admin Expert

Allstate • McCullom Lake, IL

19h • $110,000 - $181,025

About The Position

Allstate is seeking an experienced Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator to join its Database Engineering team and help build, operate, and modernize its enterprise PostgreSQL platform. The role is responsible for designing, implementing, automating, securing, tuning, and supporting PostgreSQL environments across on-premises and cloud platforms, including high availability, backup and recovery, and operational support. The ideal candidate has deep PostgreSQL expertise, strong Linux administration skills, hands-on experience with high availability and disaster recovery technologies, and can partner effectively with application, infrastructure, security, SRE, and cloud engineering teams. Lead to Expert level is considered, with Expert level desired.

The administrator will engineer and support production and non-production environments, establish platform standards and architectures, design and test high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, manage backups and recovery, improve database performance and reliability, implement security and compliance controls, and automate operational tasks using infrastructure-as-code and DevOps practices. The role also includes production support, on-call participation, incident response, documentation, mentoring, and technical leadership. This position has no supervisory duties.

Requirements

• Lead level: 7+ years of database administration experience (listed as preferred).
• Lead level: 7+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL administration experience supporting mission-critical production environments (listed as highly desired).
• Expert level: 10+ years of database administration experience.
• Expert level: 8+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL administration experience supporting mission-critical production environments.
• Strong Linux administration experience; RHEL or a comparable enterprise Linux distribution is preferred.
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL architecture, internals, configuration, security, maintenance, and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL streaming replication, high availability, disaster recovery, backup and recovery, point-in-time recovery, WAL management, and capacity planning.
• Strong SQL, execution-plan analysis, indexing, and query-optimization skills.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex database, operating system, storage, and connectivity issues in production environments.
• Experience planning and executing database upgrades, migrations, patching, and production changes.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders and work effectively across organizational boundaries.
• Strong ownership, accountability, and customer focus.
• Excellent analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work independently, manage priorities, and drive technical initiatives to completion.
• Strong collaboration, documentation, and communication skills.
• Experience working in large-scale, highly available, and regulated enterprise environments.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with Percona Distribution for PostgreSQL or Percona-supported PostgreSQL environments.
• Hands-on experience with Patroni, etcd, HAProxy, Keepalived, pgBackRest, and PostgreSQL-native monitoring and diagnostic tools.
• Experience with cloud database and infrastructure platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or Percona Monitoring and Management.
• Experience with automation and delivery tools such as Ansible, Terraform, GitHub, GitLab, or CI/CD pipelines.
• Exposure to other database technologies such as Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, or Neo4j.
• Experience leading technical initiatives, mentoring team members, and influencing platform standards.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, deploy, administer, and support enterprise PostgreSQL environments across production and non-production landscapes.
• Lead PostgreSQL installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, migrations, and lifecycle management.
• Define and maintain PostgreSQL engineering standards, reference architectures, build procedures, operational controls, and best practices.
• Participate in architecture reviews and advise application teams on database design, scalability, resilience, and operational readiness.
• Design and support PostgreSQL high-availability solutions using technologies such as Patroni, etcd, HAProxy, Keepalived, and streaming replication.
• Implement and maintain disaster-recovery strategies across multiple sites or regions.
• Plan and execute failover, switchover, recovery, and resiliency tests.
• Work with stakeholders to define, validate, and maintain recovery time and recovery point objectives.
• Design, implement, and operate enterprise PostgreSQL backup and recovery solutions.
• Administer pgBackRest, WAL archiving, point-in-time recovery, retention, and recovery validation processes.
• Conduct regular restore testing and support disaster-recovery exercises to verify recoverability.
• Monitor database availability, capacity, health, and performance.
• Analyze and optimize SQL queries, indexes, execution plans, database configurations, and workloads.
• Troubleshoot complex production incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and implement preventive actions.
• Drive database reliability, observability, capacity planning, and operational excellence initiatives.
• Implement database security controls, access-management standards, and least-privilege practices.
• Manage roles, privileges, authentication, encryption, auditing, and credential-management integrations.
• Support compliance reviews, vulnerability remediation, security assessments, and evidence requests.
• Develop automation for database provisioning, configuration, deployment, patching, validation, and routine operations.
• Use Infrastructure as Code, configuration management, source control, and CI/CD practices to improve consistency and repeatability.
• Partner with engineering teams to expand safe self-service capabilities and reduce manual operational effort.
• Provide support for mission-critical production and non-production PostgreSQL environments.
• Participate in on-call rotations, major incident response, change management, and problem management.
• Create and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, standards, and operational documentation.
• Mentor engineers, review technical solutions, and provide technical leadership for PostgreSQL initiatives.

Benefits

• Comprehensive technology setup, including a laptop, monitors, headset, keyboard, and mouse.
• Monthly connectivity reimbursement for employees eligible to work from home.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed