Lead Database Administrator
First seen by Alion on Aug 24, 2026.
About the Role:
We are seeking a seasoned Lead Database Administrator to take full ownership of our database ecosystem. You will drive reliability, performance, and scalability across multiple database platforms on-premises and cloud while acting as the technical authority and mentor for our infrastructure team.
Key Responsibilities:
Database Administration & Operations:
- Administer and maintain multiple databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis across production, staging, and development environments.
- Monitor database health, performance metrics, query execution plans, and system resources; resolve bottlenecks proactively.
- Design and enforce backup, recovery, replication, clustering, and failover strategies to guarantee high availability.
- Manage schema changes, DDL migrations, and version-controlled deployments in collaboration with engineering teams.
- Define and uphold database security standards including role-based access control, encryption, and audit logging.
Cloud Database Management:
- Administer cloud-managed database services on AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB), GCP (Cloud SQL, Spanner), or Azure Database platforms.
- Architect cloud-native database solutions with a focus on scalability, resilience, and cost optimisation.
- Lead zero-downtime migrations from on-premises databases to managed cloud services.
- Continuously evaluate emerging cloud database technologies and recommend adoption where appropriate.
Performance Tuning & Capacity Planning:
- Analyse slow queries, index strategies, and execution plans; implement targeted optimisations to meet SLA requirements.
- Conduct regular capacity planning and performance benchmarking across all environments.
- Collaborate with application engineers to review ORM usage and data models for performance at scale.
Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration:
- Mentor junior DBAs and serve as the primary technical resource for all database-related decisions.
- Establish and maintain database standards, runbooks, and operational best practices documentation.
- Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for database outages.
- Partner with DevOps to integrate database management into CI/CD pipelines and IaC frameworks (Terraform, Ansible).
Required Qualifications:
- 46 years of hands-on database administration experience across multiple database platforms.
- Deep expertise in two or more of: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, or MS SQL Server.
- Proven experience managing cloud databases on AWS (RDS / Aurora), GCP (Cloud SQL), or Azure.
- Strong SQL proficiency query optimisation, stored procedures, indexing, and execution plan analysis.
- Solid experience with replication, clustering, sharding, and high-availability architectures.
- Proficiency in Linux/Unix environments and shell scripting for automation and operations.
- Sound understanding of database security principles encryption at rest/in transit, RBAC, and compliance.
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or cloud-native monitors.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, Ansible) for database provisioning and configuration.
- Knowledge of NoSQL data modelling patterns and distributed database architectures.
- Familiarity with automated schema migration tools such as Flyway or Liquibase in GitOps workflows.
- Relevant certifications: AWS Certified Database Specialty, Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer, or Oracle DBA.
- Prior experience working in a SaaS or high-scale product engineering environment.
Skills
AWS, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DBA, DB, IT Operations, Terraform, Ansible