Senior Database Administrator (Cloud DBA)

Senior Database Administrator (Cloud DBA)

Location: Lima, Peru

Type: Full-time

Job Summary

The Senior Database Administrator manages and optimises the enterprise database platforms behind cloud-hosted client platforms: SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Snowflake, hosted primarily on AWS, with the estate mainly SQL Server on AWS RDS. The role is responsible for database performance, availability, security, automation, disaster recovery and production support for mission-critical systems. It handles database requests and incidents escalated from Cloud Support, runs maintenance, upgrades, backups and recovery, finds cost savings across the estate, and writes the runbooks that let L1 safely carry out routine database work.

Responsibilities

DBA tickets: Work the DBA queue in Jira Service Management, picking up the mandatory DBA child tickets raised by Cloud L1/L2. This covers access requests, data fixes, restores, job failures and configuration changes (approx. 10 tickets per week).

Production support: Investigate and fix database incidents on mission-critical systems, such as blocking, deadlocks, failed jobs, storage growth and connectivity, across client environments. Participate in the DBA on-call rota for out-of-hours database incidents.

Performance monitoring and tuning: Monitor, tune and optimise database performance and reliability using CloudWatch, RDS Performance Insights and Grafana. Tune queries, indexes and statistics, and right-size instances.

Backups, restores and disaster recovery: Manage RDS automated backups and snapshots and native backups to S3, and test restores. Implement and maintain HA/DR solutions, including Always On, replication, clustering and log shipping, and the high-availability setup across the RDS estate. Maintain and test disaster-recovery plans.

Environment refreshes and data movement: Copy production databases to UAT/Dev for client and internal use (approx. 6 refreshes per month). Shrink databases before they move to lower environments (copy to a new instance, truncate tables agreed with EDM Product Support).

Upgrades, patching and maintenance: Plan RDS SQL Server engine upgrades, patching and OS maintenance, write the runbooks and support L1 during the upgrade. Check the pending-maintenance status across the RDS estate and run the index and statistics maintenance jobs.

Cost optimisation: Analyse RDS and SQL Server usage to find savings, such as right-sizing, newer instance generations, storage reclaim and removing unused databases. Validate the proposed savings and support implementation.

Security, compliance and access: Ensure database security, compliance, auditing and access controls. Manage logins, roles and permissions on least-privilege principles, support audits and fix database security findings.

PostgreSQL and Snowflake administration: Administer and support PostgreSQL and Snowflake environments (users, replication, warehouses, performance, cost).

Automation and knowledge: Develop automation for routine DBA work using PowerShell, Python and T-SQL, with Terraform and Git version control following DevOps practices. Write DBA runbooks so L1 can carry out routine database tasks.

Eligibility Requirements

8+ years of database administration experience; owns problems through to resolution; clear written and spoken English

Strong expertise in SQL Server (2016/2019/2022) administration and performance tuning

Hands-on PostgreSQL administration and replication experience

Snowflake administration and support experience

Strong AWS knowledge: RDS, EC2, S3, IAM, CloudWatch

HA/DR (Always On, replication, clustering, log shipping), backup and recovery, and disaster-recovery planning

Scripting and automation with PowerShell, Python and T-SQL, or Terraform

Experience with DevOps practices and version control (Git)

Nice to Have

Experience supporting financial services or other regulated clients

AWS Certified Database Specialty; AWS Solutions Arch