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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Database Administrator (DBA)

💰 $75,000 - $150,000

Information TechnologyDatabase AdministrationDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

A Database Administrator (DBA) is responsible for the design, implementation, maintenance, security, and performance of an organization’s database systems. The DBA ensures data availability, integrity, and confidentiality across on‑premises and cloud platforms, supports application teams with schema design and query optimization, automates routine tasks, and leads capacity planning and disaster recovery strategies. This role requires strong SQL expertise, experience with relational and cloud-native databases, and a proactive approach to monitoring, patching, and performance tuning.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior DBA or Database Support Analyst
  • System Administrator / Linux or Windows Administrator
  • Data Analyst or BI Developer with strong SQL experience

Advancement To:

  • Senior Database Administrator / Lead DBA
  • Database Architect / Data Platform Architect
  • Data Engineering Manager or Head of Data Platform

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer (specializing in data platform automation)
  • Cloud Database Engineer / Cloud Platform Specialist

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Design, install, configure, and maintain production and non‑production database environments (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL) ensuring systems meet defined availability, performance and security requirements.
  • Monitor database performance and resource utilization using APM and monitoring tools (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, SolarWinds) and implement tuning recommendations including index optimization, query rewriting, and plan management to improve throughput and reduce latency.
  • Plan, implement and test backup, restore and disaster recovery strategies (RMAN, SQL Server backup, pg_basebackup, point-in-time recovery) to meet RTO/RPO objectives and provide documented recovery procedures.
  • Architect and maintain high‑availability and clustering solutions (Always On Availability Groups, Oracle Data Guard, MySQL Group Replication, Patroni) and implement replication/streaming mechanisms to support fault tolerance and read scalability.
  • Perform database patching, version upgrades and schema migrations with minimal downtime, coordinate change windows, run pre/post checks and provide rollback plans.
  • Administer security controls including database authentication/authorization, role-based access, encryption at rest/in transit (TDE, SSL/TLS), auditing and periodic review of privileged accounts to meet compliance requirements (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR).
  • Create, review and optimize complex stored procedures, triggers, functions and views while enforcing coding best practices and mitigating locking/blocking/concurrency issues.
  • Lead capacity planning and growth forecasting for CPU, memory, storage and IOPS; provision resources and design partitioning/indexing strategies to accommodate forecasted volume and performance targets.
  • Build and maintain automated provisioning, configuration and deployment processes for databases using Infrastructure as Code and automation tools (Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, PowerShell DSC).
  • Execute root cause analysis for production incidents involving database failures or performance degradation; produce post-incident reports, corrective actions, and long-term remediation plans.
  • Collaborate with application developers, data engineers and platform teams to review schema changes, DDL migrations, and ensure backward compatibility and performance before production rollout.
  • Implement and maintain data retention, archival, and purging processes to reduce storage costs and maintain query performance while ensuring business and compliance needs are met.
  • Manage database capacity on cloud platforms (AWS RDS/Aurora, Azure SQL Database, Google Cloud SQL, AWS Aurora Serverless) including right‑sizing instances, storage autoscaling, and cost optimization.
  • Design and operate secure database connectivity patterns including service accounts, secrets management, network access controls and VPN/VPC peering for hybrid architectures.
  • Establish and enforce database standards, naming conventions, change control procedures, and documentation — including runbooks, DR playbooks and configuration baselines.
  • Automate routine DBA tasks (patching, backups, health checks, index maintenance) with scripts and orchestration to reduce manual effort and human error.
  • Implement and tune database monitoring alerts and dashboards to provide actionable insights and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) for database incidents.
  • Support database-related application deployments and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD) and participate in release planning and rollback strategies for schema and data changes.
  • Lead or participate in database migration projects including on‑prem to cloud migrations, cross-platform upgrades, and consolidation efforts, ensuring data integrity and minimal downtime.
  • Conduct security and compliance audits, remediate findings, and collaborate with InfoSec teams to implement database hardening, encryption, and logging/auditing best practices.
  • Provide mentoring and technical guidance to junior DBAs and operations staff, including knowledge transfers, pair troubleshooting, and documentation reviews.
  • Maintain strong vendor relationships, engage with database support services (Oracle, Microsoft, AWS) for escalations, and evaluate third-party tools for backup, monitoring, and performance analysis.
  • Evaluate and adopt new database technologies (NoSQL, NewSQL, sharding solutions) where appropriate and produce cost-benefit analyses for platform modernization.
  • Participate in capacity planning, budgeting and procurement activities related to database infrastructure, licensing and cloud service consumption.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in evaluating ETL/ELT pipelines and support data ingestion workflows to ensure consistent data quality and performance.
  • Provide on-call support rotation and incident response for database-related outages and service degradations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Advanced proficiency in SQL and procedural extensions (T-SQL, PL/SQL, pgSQL) for query tuning, stored procedures and complex data transformations.
  • Deep experience with at least one major RDBMS: Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL — including backup/recovery and HA/DR mechanisms.
  • Cloud database expertise: provisioning and managing AWS RDS/Aurora, Azure SQL Database, Google Cloud SQL and familiarity with cloud native features and cost optimization.
  • Performance tuning and query optimization: execution plans, indexing strategy, partitioning, statistics management and query profiling tools.
  • Backup, restore and disaster recovery planning and execution including point-in-time recovery, replication failover, and DR testing.
  • Database security and compliance: encryption (TDE), access control, auditing, vulnerability scanning and regulatory controls (PCI, HIPAA, GDPR).
  • Automation and IaC: scripting with Bash, PowerShell, Python and automation using Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation for repeatable deployments.
  • Monitoring, observability and alerting: Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios and native RDS/Azure monitoring.
  • OS and environment administration: Linux system administration, Windows Server fundamentals, storage and networking concepts relevant to DB performance.
  • Migration and upgrade experience: cross-version upgrades, platform migrations, data export/import strategies, schema conversion tools and zero-downtime deployment techniques.
  • Containerization and orchestration fundamentals: Docker, Kubernetes, and managing stateful services in containerized environments (optional but increasingly required).
  • Familiarity with ETL/ELT tools and data pipelines (Informatica, Talend, AWS Glue, Fivetran) to support data integration and replication scenarios.
  • Knowledge of database design principles: normalization, denormalization, data modeling, and working with DBAs/architects on schema changes.

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a pragmatic approach to troubleshooting complex production issues.
  • Excellent communication skills to liaise with developers, product managers, security teams and stakeholders, translating technical concepts into business impact.
  • Proactive ownership and accountability for system reliability, documentation and continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Collaboration and teamwork mindset; able to mentor junior staff and participate in cross-functional projects.
  • Effective time management and prioritization in high-pressure, incident-driven environments.
  • Attention to detail and commitment to producing clear runbooks, SOPs and technical documentation.
  • Customer-oriented focus with ability to balance operational needs and business priorities.
  • Adaptability to change and continuous learning orientation to evaluate new database technologies and cloud offerings.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related field; certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator, Oracle Certified Professional (OCP), AWS Certified Database - Specialty, or relevant cloud certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Software Engineering
  • Data Management / Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8+ years of professional experience in database administration, with hands-on experience in production database systems and a track record of incident remediation and performance improvements.

Preferred: 5+ years managing enterprise-level database systems across on-premises and cloud environments, demonstrated experience with high-availability architectures, large-scale migrations, and security/compliance programs.

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