Senior SQL Database Administrator at Carvana in Phoenix, AZ

About The Team And Position

Do you have a natural curiosity to build new technologies? When you hear the acronym IMDB, do you think of an in-memory database instead of movies? If so, join a dynamic team of database engineers aimed at supporting the whole new way to buy a car. We are a fast-growing team that is focused on performance, scalability, and reliability to provide the best experience to our customers, both internal and external.

Our Database team is the bouncer of Carvana’s data – and we have no qualms about tossing out the riff-raff. Our team partners with various internal stakeholders – from marketing to data science to engineering – to help Carvana become a strong, data-driven company.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Work with tools like Management Studio, Redgate SQL Monitor, Integration Services, Reporting Services, and Tableau against the latest versions of SQL Server and Azure SQL databases.
• Become familiar with the multitude of ways data flows through our various systems in order to contribute creative problem-solving solutions, as well as to ensure the data integrity among various data stores.
• Help architect, design, and develop complex database solutions to support business strategies and deliver business value.
• Provide guidance and technical support for all SQL Server production databases, services, and infrastructure, both in house and cloud resident.
• Conduct systematic performance tuning (i.e., server, database and query performance tuning, and application specific database request optimizations).
• Analyze database workloads and identify opportunities for system performance optimizations.
• Own, track and resolve database related alerts and requests, resolving incidents within defined SLAs.
• Establish and monitor data security and governance policies and procedures.
• Design, implement and support cloud based HA/DR solutions.
• Participate in team lunch and learns, design sessions, and code reviews.
• Work with others to understand and deliver data so that non-technical resources can understand/respond as needed.
• Take part in cross-functional project teams with data scientists, product buyers, and customer advocates.
• Work with leaders and users to define business needs and translate them to functional requirements to the technical team.
• Work with end-users and other IT teams to resolve operational issues and mitigate risks as applicable.

What You Should Have

• An undergraduate degree in fields such as Management Information Systems, Computer Science, or have the equivalent experience.
• At least 7 years of experience working with relational databases and a good grasp of the relational database model.
• Proven experience having worked with and feel confident with SQL Server.
• Embraces teamwork and lives by the motto that “We are all in this together.”
• Fearless of being un-knowledgeable about a particular subject area/technology; yearning to learn and ask questions, with a strong desire to grow through challenging work and new technologies.
• Excited to do performance tuning and process streamlining (woo!).
• Knowledge of the query store, what a query plan is and how to review one.
• Understand the purpose of primary, foreign, and unique keys.
• Understand indexing concepts, like the difference between clustered/non-clustered.
• Familiar with the concepts of normalization and referential integrity.
• Understand the difference between DML and DDL.
• Passion to learn industry best practices and implementing processes accordingly.
• A forward-thinking mentality; a desire to predict how future company evolution will affect processes implemented today.