Senior Database Administrator

About the role

IC Markets is hiring a Senior Database Administrator to own the reliability, performance, and security of the PostgreSQL estate behind our trading platform. You will be the person we trust to keep this platform fast, safe, and audit-ready as transaction volumes grow.

This is a hands-on engineering role, not a pure operations seat. You will tune real workloads, review schema and query design with application teams, and set the standards that keep our data layer healthy under intermittent heavy load.

Key responsibilities

Performance & capacity

• Own connection management strategy end to end - introduce and operate connection pooling (RDS Proxy or PgBouncer).
• Establish query-level observability: enable and maintain pg_stat_statements, define baselines, and drive down the slowest and most frequent queries.
• Tune memory and planner parameters (work_mem, shared_buffers, effective_cache_size and related settings) against the actual instance profile and workload.
• Review indexing strategy: identify redundant, duplicate, and unused indexes; recommend and validate new ones against production access patterns.
• Plan capacity and scaling ahead of demand, including read-replica and Aurora scaling decisions.

Reliability & operations

• Own backup, restore, and point-in-time-recovery strategy, and prove it with regular restore tests.
• Monitor and manage vacuum/auto vacuum health, transaction-ID wraparound risk, replication lag, and locking/contention.
• Define and maintain high-availability and disaster-recovery posture, including failover runbooks and RTO/RPO targets.
• Build proactive monitoring and alerting (CloudWatch, Performance Insights, or equivalent) so issues are caught before users feel them.

Security & compliance

• Own database access control: role and privilege design, least-privilege enforcement, and credential lifecycle including password expiry and rotation.
• Support the firm's regulatory obligations with auditable controls, access reviews, and change records.
• Ensure client and account data is handled in line with data-protection and broker compliance requirements.

Collaboration

• Partner with application, DevOps, and cloud teams on schema design, migrations, and release safety.
• Write clear runbooks and documentation, and mentor engineers on database best practices.

Required qualifications

• 5+ years administering production PostgreSQL at meaningful scale, ideally in a high- availability, transactional environment.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL on AWS, especially Amazon Aurora / RDS.
• Demonstrable query tuning and troubleshooting skill: reading EXPLAIN plans, using pg_stat_statements, diagnosing locks, bloat, and slow queries.
• Strong grasp of connection management and pooling (RDS Proxy, PgBouncer).
• Solid experience with backup/restore, PITR, replication, and failover.
• Working knowledge of database security and access control, and comfort operating in a regulated or audited environment.
• Proficiency with SQL and at least one scripting language (Python, Bash, or similar) for automation.

Preferred / nice to have

• Experience in financial services, trading, brokerage, or another latency- and correctness- sensitive domain.
• Infrastructure-as-code and observability tooling (Terraform, CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus).
• Exposure to schema migration tooling and safe zero-downtime deployment practices.