Database Administrator Role
OpenDataJobs Washington, District of Columbia, United States
IT Services and IT Consulting · 2-10 employees
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About the role
Database Administrators are responsible for maintaining database availability, security, and performance through proactive monitoring and configuration management. They handle operational tasks including backups, disaster recovery, patch management, and performance tuning to ensure reliable service delivery.
What they look for
Requirements
Candidates must have production administration experience with relational database engines or managed services. Proficiency in performance diagnosis, capacity management, security controls, and automation scripting is required for this role.
Full description
The workDatabase Administrators keep database services available, recoverable, secure, observable, and appropriately sized. They manage the operational conditions under which database code and data run, from configuration and capacity to backups, upgrades, replication, and incident response.
The role includes establishing recovery procedures, testing restores and failover, monitoring workload health, investigating contention and resource pressure, coordinating patches, and administering privileged access. Performance work is evidence-based: Database Administrators connect application behavior, query plans, configuration, data growth, and infrastructure signals before changing a production system.
Managed database services automate parts of installation, patching, backups, scaling, and high availability, but they do not eliminate operational ownership. Teams still need people to set policy, configure services, validate recovery, tune workloads, manage access, plan version upgrades, interpret monitoring, and respond when service behavior does not match expectations.
What you may build• Monitoring, alerting, health checks, capacity forecasts, and operational dashboards.
- Backup, restore, replication, failover, and disaster-recovery procedures with tested evidence.
- Database configuration baselines, maintenance automation, patch plans, and upgrade runbooks.
- Privileged-access controls, role administration, encryption configurations, and audit support.
- Performance investigations and remediation plans spanning queries, indexes, configuration, storage, and compute.
Who you areYou are methodical when systems are healthy and steady when they are not. You prepare for failure before it happens, keep operational evidence current, and understand that an untested backup or undocumented recovery path is not a reliable control.
You make careful production changes, communicate risk and service impact clearly, and work well with developers, architects, security teams, cloud platform teams, and service owners. You know when to automate a repeatable task and when a change needs human review.
What you bring• Production administration experience with one or more relational database engines or managed database services.
- Hands-on knowledge of monitoring, performance diagnosis, capacity management, backups, restores, replication, and high availability.
- Experience planning patches, major-version upgrades, maintenance windows, rollback paths, and disaster-recovery tests.
- Understanding of database access control, privileged operations, encryption, audit needs, and security hardening.
- Scripting or automation skills for repeatable maintenance, evidence collection, health checks, and operational response.
What future openings may requireA future opening may require PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Amazon Relational Database Service, Azure SQL, or another specific engine or managed service. The operational model may range from self-managed infrastructure to platform-managed services, with different divisions of responsibility for patching, backups, availability, and scaling.
Workloads that support artificial intelligence (AI) may introduce vector indexes, bursty retrieval traffic, new retention patterns, or sensitive interaction data. Those are database workload characteristics to secure, monitor, tune, and recover. Model operations, AI evaluation, and AI-specific controls remain outside the Database Administrator's core ownership.
What future openings may requireA future opening may require PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Amazon Relational Database Service, Azure SQL, or another specific engine or managed service. The operational model may range from self-managed infrastructure to platform-managed services, with different divisions of responsibility for patching, backups, availability, and scaling.
Workloads that support artificial intelligence (AI) may introduce vector indexes, bursty retrieval traffic, new retention patterns, or sensitive interaction data. Those are database workload characteristics to secure, monitor, tune, and recover. Model operations, AI evaluation, and AI-specific controls remain outside the Database Administrator's core ownership.
Compensation, benefits, work location, and employment terms are set for each specific opening and will be stated with that opening
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