Senior Database Administrator

Job Description Roles & Responsibilities Flairstech is looking for a Senior Database Administrator to join our engineering team, reporting to the CTO. You'll own how we design, operate, and govern data at the database layer schema and migration standards, performance tuning and capacity planning, backup and disaster-recovery discipline, and access security across our production MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, partnering closely with engineering and DevSecOps rather than working in isolation. This role also plays an integral part in a major new initiative: a procurement and catalog platform built around a canonical product/supplier-offering data model, master data governance, and an event-driven architecture, much of it extending our existing PostgreSQL environment (including the pgvector extension for semantic search and relationship modeling for a knowledge graph. You'll help design and scale the data model underneath that platform alongside a small, senior engineering team, and set the standards the rest of the organization builds on as our database needs continue to grow. What You'll Do Database Design & Standards Establish schema design standards, migration conventions, and a review process for database changes across MySQL and PostgreSQL services work currently done ad hoc by the engineers building each feature. Review and advise on schema changes proposed by application engineers (procure, core-api, job-workers), with a focus on indexing strategy, normalization tradeoffs, and query performance. Document data modeling conventions and migration practices so the standards outlive any one person's institutional knowledge. Performance, Reliability & Operations Own query performance tuning and capacity planning across production databases, monitoring for slow queries, lock contention, and connection saturation before they become incidents. Partner with DevSecOps to define and test backup, restore, and disaster-recovery procedures verifying, not just configuring, Multi-AZ failover and the existing 30-day backup retention. Build database health monitoring and alerting so degradation is caught proactively rather than discovered during troubleshooting. Lifecycle, Governance & Security Own database version lifecycle management: planning and executing engine upgrades ahead of end-of-support, and decommissioning legacy or duplicate instances once migrations are confirmed complete. Partner with DevSecOps to bring database versions under Infrastructure-as-Code management and to close network exposure and access-control findings as they're identified. Manage database access control and credential hygiene least-privilege roles, credential rotation, and audit logging of privileged access. Data Platform & Analytics Provide database and data-modeling expertise for our Snowflake/dbt analytics environment, helping extend the same version and access governance there. Support engineering and product teams with data modeling guidance for features with analytics or reporting requirements. Act as the team's go-to resource for database questions, mentoring engineers on schema design and query performance as part of code review. Catalog & Search Platform Initiative Serve as the database lead for a new procurement and catalog platform a canonical product/supplier-offering data model with master data governance, versioned catalog history, and multi-tenant customer-specific views extending our existing PostgreSQL environment rather than standing up new database infrastructure. Design and tune the PostgreSQL schema underneath the catalog domain, including catalog versioning and audit history, an ID crosswalk to legacy transactional records, and relationship tables supporting a knowledge graph. Support the platform's pgvector-based semantic search and its event-driven architecture schema-versioned events, idempotent processing, and the replay strategy that lets catalog and search state be rebuilt from history. Advise on performance and isolation for multi-tenant customer catalogs, including row-level tenant isolation and materialized views for high-volume accounts. Extend our Snowflake/dbt warehouse to support the platform's analytics and data-quality KPIs, such as match confidence, pricing/inventory freshness, and catalog completeness. What We're Looking For Required 7+ years of hands-on database administration experience in production environments, including at least one relational engine at meaningful scale (MySQL and/or PostgreSQL). Demonstrated ownership of query performance tuning, indexing strategy, and query optimization in a live production system. Experience planning and executing major database engine upgrades and migrations (e.g., blue/green or similar cutover strategies) with minimal downtime. Strong understanding of backup/restore, high-availability, and disaster-recovery patterns (Multi-AZ, automated backups, failover testing) in a cloud environment (AWS RDS or equivalent). Comfort working with event-driven, eventually-consistent data architectures schema versioning, idempotent processing, and rebuild-from-event-history patterns not just traditional transactional systems. Experience establishing schema design standards, review processes, or data modeling conventions for an engineering team without a dedicated DBA function. Comfort partnering with application engineers and DevSecOps rather than working in isolation this role is as much about building a practice as running one. Practical database security fundamentals: least-privilege access, credential rotation, and encryption at rest and in transit. Proficiency in SQL and at least one scripting/automation language (Python or Bash) for tooling and monitoring. Nice to Have Experience with cloud data warehouses and transformation tooling (e.g., Snowflake, dbt). Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) for managing database resources. Experience with PostgreSQL extensions such as pgvector, or modeling graph-like relationships in a relational database. Experience supporting master data management, entity resolution, or record-matching systems. Experience operating in a SOC 2 or similarly compliance-driven environment. Experience Desired Candidate Profile 7+ years of hands-on database administration experience in production environments, including at least one relational engine at meaningful scale (MySQL and/or PostgreSQL). Demonstrated ownership of query performance tuning, indexing strategy, and query optimization in a live production system. Experience planning and executing major database engine upgrades and migrations (e.g., blue/green or similar cutover strategies) with minimal downtime. Strong understanding of backup/restore, high-availability, and disaster-recovery patterns (Multi-AZ, automated backups, failover testing) in a cloud environment (AWS RDS or equivalent). Comfort working with event-driven, eventually-consistent data architectures schema versioning, idempotent processing, and rebuild-from-event-history patterns not just traditional transactional systems. Experience establishing schema design standards, review processes, or data modeling conventions for an engineering team without a dedicated DBA function. Comfort partnering with application engineers and DevSecOps rather than working in isolation this role is as much about building a practice as running one. Practical database security fundamentals: least-privilege access, credential rotation, and encryption at rest and in transit. Proficiency in SQL and at least one scripting/automation language (Python or Bash) for tooling and monitoring. Company Industry IT - Software Services Department / Functional Area IT Software Keywords Senior Database Administrator Get real-time job updates only on our App