Staff Database Administrator

Lytx, Inc.

About The Position

At Lytx, you'll have the opportunity to work on cutting-edge technologies and contribute to the Database Infrastructure and Solutions to help support the scalability of our global IoT platform. You'll collaborate with cross-functional teams, drive innovation, and play a crucial role in shaping the future of our infrastructure practices. The Staff Database Administrator is a senior individual contributor responsible for the design, implementation, and operation of cloud database services that are highly available, scalable, secure, and cost-effective. This role provides technical leadership across Amazon RDS (Postgres, MySQL, Aurora), MongoDB Atlas, and Microsoft SQL Server, enabling SaaS applications and cloud operations to run reliably at scale. The engineer plays a key role in incident management, participates in on-call rotations, and partners with a 24x7x365 Managed Service Provider (MSP) to maintain production stability.

Requirements

Minimum 9 years of hands-on experience as a Database Administrator.
Extensive hands-on experience operating production workloads on Amazon RDS (Postgres, MySQL, Aurora), MongoDB Atlas, and Microsoft SQL Server in a SaaS or large-scale cloud environment.
Proven expertise in performance tuning, query optimization, indexing strategies, and troubleshooting complex database issues under time pressure.
Strong proficiency in infrastructure-as-code, scripting, and automation using tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and at least one scripting language (e.g., Python, Bash).
Demonstrated experience in 24x7 operations, on-call support, and incident management, including working with or within MSP models.
Solid understanding of HA/DR patterns, replication, backup and restore strategies, and security best practices for cloud databases.
Hands-on experience implementing database schema change management tools (Liquibase or equivalent) in CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

Own day-to-day operations and advanced administration of AWS RDS (Postgres, MySQL, Aurora), MongoDB Atlas, and Microsoft SQL Server, including configuration, patching, scaling, and troubleshooting.
Implement and refine database standards, automation, and operational runbooks to ensure availability, performance, security, and compliance across all environments.
Collaborate with application and platform engineering teams on schema design, indexing strategies, query tuning, and data lifecycle management to optimize workload performance and cost.
Design, build, and maintain automation for provisioning, patching, backups, cloning, and monitoring using tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, and native AWS services like CloudWatch and Systems Manager.
Implement and enhance observability for databases, including metrics, logs, traces, alert thresholds, and performance dashboards to enable proactive detection and rapid diagnosis of issues.
Design and validate high availability, backup, and disaster recovery strategies across regions and accounts, including regular testing and documentation of recovery procedures
Participate in a 24x7x365 on-call rotation for production database incidents, leading technical response for Sev1/Sev2 events and driving toward rapid containment and resolution
Mentor other Database Administrators and platform engineers through design reviews, pairing, and knowledge sharing, helping elevate overall team capability while remaining as an individual contributor.
Own and standardize database schema change management across the organization using tools such as Liquibase, ensuring all changes are version-controlled, peer-reviewed, auditable, and safely deployable.