Database Administrator – Infrastructure & Disaster Recovery

Job Objective

This role is responsible for managing, maintaining, monitoring, and safeguarding the organization's enterprise database systems to ensure their reliability, performance efficiency, data integrity, and disaster recovery capabilities. The Database Administrator supports upgrades, backup and restoration activities, high-availability setups, and collaborates across teams to uphold dependable database services.

Core Responsibilities

• Install, set up, administer, patch, and upgrade approved enterprise database platforms on-premises and in select cloud environments.
• Manage database instances, schemas, storage, system parameters, transaction logs, connectivity, and database-level objects.
• Conduct routine health and integrity checks, maintain indexes and statistics, and perform operational housekeeping tasks.
• Keep accurate records on database inventories, configurations, dependencies, and operational procedures.
• Assist in database migrations, upgrades, consolidation, and modernization projects.
• Monitor availability, performance, workloads, resource usage, and storage expansion of databases.
• Diagnose query performance issues such as locking, blocking, deadlocks, and database bottlenecks.
• Analyze query execution plans to suggest improvements in queries, indexes, schemas, or configurations.
• Establish performance baselines and forecast computing, memory, storage, and connection resource needs.
• Coordinate infrastructure capacity planning with systems, storage, and cloud teams.
• Configure and maintain database backup and recovery aligned with criticality and recovery objectives.
• Manage database-native backup, restoration, point-in-time recovery, and integration with enterprise backup tools.
• Monitor backup jobs, investigate failures, and address recoverability gaps promptly.
• Conduct scheduled restoration and recovery tests, validating restored databases’ consistency and integrity.
• Document backup schedules, recovery records, and evidence of recovery testing.
• Set up and oversee high-availability, replication, and disaster recovery technologies for databases.
• Track replication health, synchronization, availability, failover readiness, and resolve related technical problems.
• Maintain procedures for failover, failback, restoration, and recovery for critical database services.
• Participate in switchover exercises, failover tests, and disaster recovery drills.
• Verify database status following recovery activities to ensure availability, integrity, connectivity, processing, and replication are intact.
• Measure actual recovery times against targets and recommend improvements where necessary.
• Coordinate recovery efforts with infrastructure, applications, networking, backup, and cybersecurity teams.
• Enforce database security by applying standards, secure configurations, and least-privilege principles.
• Manage user accounts, roles, privileged and service accounts, and assign permissions accordingly.
• Support periodic reviews of access, vulnerability assessments, security patching, and auditing requirements.
• Implement logging, auditing, and encryption in coordination with cybersecurity teams.
• Identify and escalate any unsupported components, excessive privileges, or database security risks.
• Handle database changes through formal change management procedures including deployment, validation, rollback, and recovery actions.
• Create and maintain automation scripts for monitoring, maintenance, and backup validation activities.
• Store scripts and configurations in approved version control systems.
• Monitor database lifecycle and plan for patching, upgrades, migrations, or retirement.
• Identify technical debt and propose upgrades, consolidation, or modernization measures.
• Troubleshoot and resolve incidents related to database availability, connectivity, performance, corruption, replication, or recovery.
• Conduct root-cause analysis for major or recurring incidents and implement fixes.
• Restore database services according to priority and recovery procedures.
• Generate reports on database health, performance, capacity, backups, and recovery readiness.
• Participate in on-call or emergency support as required.