Senior Database Administrator

Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator

Duties and Responsibilities

• Lead 24x7 monitoring and proactive management of PostgreSQL production, staging, and development environments.
• Perform advanced performance tuning at query, schema, and system levels — identify slow queries, analyze execution plans, and implement effective optimization strategies.
• Manage PostgreSQL partitioning strategies (range, list, hash) for handling large data volumes and improving query performance.
• Implement and maintain robust backup and disaster recovery strategies including pg_basebackup, pgBackRest, barman, and Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR).
• Architect and administer streaming replication, logical replication, and failover mechanisms for high availability and business continuity.
• Plan and execute PostgreSQL upgrades and data center migrations, ensuring minimal downtime and data integrity.
• Deep dive into PostgreSQL internals — WAL, shared buffers, background processes, autovacuum internals, and query executor/optimizer behavior — to diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks.
• Design and implement monitoring and alerting frameworks using tools like pg_stat_statements, pgMonitor, Prometheus, or custom scripts.
• Perform root-cause analysis (RCA) of incidents and provide detailed performance diagnostics reports.
• Review and optimize database memory and I/O parameters (shared_buffers, work_mem, effective_cache_size, checkpoint tuning, autovacuum tuning, etc.).
• Manage and audit user roles, security policies, and ensure databases are aligned with enterprise security standards.
• Coordinate with application, infrastructure, and Development teams to design scalable, fault-tolerant PostgreSQL architectures.
• Evaluate and recommend new PostgreSQL extensions and open-source tools to enhance database reliability and observability.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation for operational procedures, performance baselines, backup/recovery workflows, and failover protocols.

Skills and Experience Required

• 4+ years of professional experience administering PostgreSQL databases in production environments.
• In-depth understanding of PostgreSQL internals, including WAL, MVCC, buffer management, background writer, and planner/executor lifecycle.
• Proven expertise in query tuning and performance diagnostics using EXPLAIN, EXPLAIN (ANALYZE), pg_stat_statements, and auto_explain.
• Advanced hands-on experience with backup and recovery tools: pg_basebackup, pg_dump, pgBackRest, barman, wal-g, and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR).
• Strong knowledge of partitioning design, index management, vacuum/analyze strategies, and statistics optimization.
• Experience in high availability (HA) and replication architectures — synchronous/asynchronous replication, cascading replication, and failover automation (Patroni, repmgr, etc.).
• Solid knowledge of Linux system administration and shell scripting (bash, PowerShell) for automation and maintenance.
• Expertise in PostgreSQL configuration tuning for CPU, memory, and disk performance optimization.
• Experience with database migration and cross-data center replication, including schema and data synchronization strategies.
• Familiarity with connection poolers (pgBouncer, Pgpool-II) and partition management tools (pg_partman).
• Strong troubleshooting skills to pinpoint locks, deadlocks, I/O bottlenecks, replication lag, and performance degradations.
• Exposure to cloud-based PostgreSQL services (AWS RDS/Aurora) is a plus.
• Experience contributing to PostgreSQL tuning standards, documentation, and automation pipelines.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of observability and monitoring frameworks like Prometheus, Grafana, and pg_stat_kcache, pg_stat_statements.
• Familiarity with query-level workload analysis and capacity planning.
• Passion for automation, scripting, and performance benchmarking.