We are looking for a
Senior Cloud Database Administrator (DBA) to own the operational stability, performance, resiliency, and scalability of ACA's mission-critical database platforms.
This is a hybrid role (2 days in the office) located in Durham, NC. The successful candidate will be a hands-on DBA with deep experience supporting mission-critical databases in cloud and hybrid environments. This person will be responsible for day-to-day database administration, proactive health monitoring, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, disaster recovery readiness, and operational best practices across ACA's database estate.
This role requires someone who can work closely with engineering, DevOps, security, and architecture teams to keep our databases stable, performant, secure, and scalable as our platform grows. The candidate should also be comfortable supporting database modernization efforts, including migration of workloads from SQL Server to PostgreSQL and other cloud-native data platforms.
Key Duties & Responsibilities - Administer and support production and non-production database environments, including SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and AWS-managed database services.
- Monitor database health, availability, capacity, and performance to identify issues before they impact clients or internal users.
- Troubleshoot and resolve database performance issues, including slow queries, blocking, resource contention, indexing problems, and inefficient application data access patterns.
- Design, implement, and maintain backup, restore, high availability, and disaster recovery processes for mission-critical databases.
- Regularly test recovery procedures to ensure databases can be restored within required business recovery objectives.
- Maintain database security best practices, including access control, permissions, encryption, auditability, and compliance with internal data protection policies.
- Support database patching, upgrades, maintenance windows, and lifecycle management with minimal disruption to business operations.
- Partner with application engineering teams to review database design, improve query performance, optimize schemas, and ensure applications use databases efficiently.
- Establish and maintain database operational standards, documentation, runbooks, monitoring dashboards, and incident response procedures.
- Support cloud database operations in AWS, including RDS, Aurora, EC2-hosted databases, parameter/configuration management, storage planning, replication, and scaling.
- Assist with database migration and modernization efforts, including schema conversion, data movement, validation, performance testing, and production cutover planning.
- Recommend and implement tools, automation, and process improvements that increase database reliability, observability, performance, and operational efficiency.
Desired Experience & Qualifications - 7+ years of hands-on DBA experience supporting business-critical production databases.
- Strong expertise with Microsoft SQL Server administration, including performance tuning, backup/recovery, high availability, security, and production troubleshooting.
- Experience administering PostgreSQL and/or MySQL in production environments.
- Experience operating databases in AWS, especially RDS, Aurora, and EC2-hosted database platforms.
- Strong understanding of database monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, backup strategy, disaster recovery, patching, and operational support practices.
- Proven ability to diagnose and resolve production database issues, including performance degradation, blocking, failed jobs, replication issues, storage constraints, and application-related database problems.
- Experience working with engineering teams to improve database design, indexing strategies, query performance, and application data access patterns.
- Experience with database migration projects, ideally including SQL Server to PostgreSQL or movement from self-managed databases to AWS-managed database services.
- Ability to develop scripts, automation, reports, or operational tooling to improve database administration and monitoring.
- Familiarity with DocumentDB, OpenSearch, data lakes, or broader cloud data platforms is a plus, but not required.
- Strong analytical, communication, and documentation skills.
- Demonstrated ability to operate calmly and effectively in production incident situations.
- A bachelor's degree required for candidate consideration. MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field is a plus.
