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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Database Coordinator

💰 $ - $

ITData ManagementDatabase AdministrationOperationsTechnology

🎯 Role Definition

The Database Coordinator is a hands-on operational role responsible for the day-to-day health, availability, and integrity of production and non-production database environments. This role bridges application teams, data engineering, and IT operations to manage backups, performance, security, change control, and data delivery. The ideal candidate combines technical expertise (SQL, backup/recovery, performance tuning, cloud DB services) with strong stakeholder coordination, documentation discipline, and adherence to data governance and compliance requirements.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Database Administrator / Database Support Analyst
  • Data Analyst or Business Intelligence Analyst with strong SQL focus
  • IT Support / Systems Administrator with database exposure

Advancement To:

  • Senior Database Administrator
  • Database Manager / Database Operations Lead
  • Data Engineer or Data Platform Engineer
  • IT Operations Manager or Head of Data Governance

Lateral Moves:

  • ETL / Integration Developer
  • Application Support / Release Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Monitor daily database health and performance across on-premises and cloud environments, proactively identifying anomalies and escalating incidents to minimize downtime and meet SLA targets.
  • Execute, schedule, and validate full, incremental, and point-in-time backups; maintain and test disaster recovery procedures and runbooks to ensure recoverability and business continuity.
  • Tune SQL queries, indexes, and schema design in collaboration with developers and data engineers to improve application response times and reduce resource consumption.
  • Manage database user accounts, roles, and privileges following least-privilege principles, perform periodic access reviews, and maintain audit trails for compliance (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
  • Coordinate and implement schema changes, migrations, and release deployments using version-controlled change management processes, ensuring rollback plans and minimal service disruption.
  • Design, maintain, and publish data dictionaries and metadata catalogs to support data discoverability, lineage, and consistent usage across systems.
  • Orchestrate and troubleshoot ETL and replication jobs; work with integration teams to ensure reliable data flows, consistency, and near-real-time synchronization where required.
  • Perform capacity planning and forecasting for database growth (storage, compute, IOPS), recommend hardware or cloud resource adjustments, and contribute to budgeting and procurement decisions.
  • Apply security best practices including configuration hardening, encryption at rest/in transit, patch management, and vulnerability remediation in collaboration with security teams.
  • Create, maintain, and update runbooks, standard operating procedures, and operational playbooks for common database tasks and incident response.
  • Lead or support cross-functional root cause analysis (RCA) after major incidents, document findings, and implement preventive controls or process improvements.
  • Automate routine administrative tasks (maintenance windows, backups, patching, alerts) using scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash) and orchestration tools to reduce manual toil.
  • Maintain and monitor replication, clustering, high-availability (HA), and failover configurations; test failover regularly and validate data consistency post-recovery.
  • Validate and reconcile data integrity across systems through regular checks, anomaly detection, and reconciliation routines to ensure trusted reporting and analytics.
  • Manage vendor relationships for third-party database tools, cloud providers, and support contracts; coordinate vendor escalations during platform incidents.
  • Implement and enforce retention policies for data and backups in alignment with legal, regulatory, and business requirements.
  • Support development and QA teams by provisioning masked or synthetic database copies for testing, ensuring sensitive data is protected while enabling realistic test scenarios.
  • Maintain monitoring dashboards and alerts (e.g., metrics for latency, CPU, memory, deadlocks, long-running queries) and continuously improve observability.
  • Review, approve, and execute database-related change requests in change advisory board (CAB) processes; ensure transparent communication with stakeholders and affected teams.
  • Provide on-call support for database incidents, rotate through incident rosters, and respond to after-hours emergencies to restore service quickly.
  • Assist data governance initiatives by enforcing naming conventions, metadata tags, and classification standards for database objects and sensitive data.
  • Lead or participate in database consolidation, migration, or cloud lift-and-shift projects including planning, risk mitigation, cutover execution, and post-migration validation.

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.
  • Train application owners and junior DB staff on operational procedures, runbooks, and best practices.
  • Evaluate and pilot new database technologies, managed services, or monitoring tools to improve efficiency and reliability.
  • Document cost-optimization opportunities in cloud database environments and implement rightsizing recommendations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Advanced SQL proficiency (query optimization, window functions, complex joins) with practical experience in production troubleshooting.
  • Practical experience administering relational databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle (installation, configuration, patching).
  • Familiarity with cloud-managed databases and services (AWS RDS/Aurora, Azure SQL Database, Google Cloud SQL, DynamoDB) and cloud migration patterns.
  • Backup and recovery expertise (RMAN, native backups, snapshots) and validated disaster recovery planning and testing.
  • Performance tuning skills (indexing strategies, query plans, statistics, resource governance) and use of profiling/monitoring tools.
  • Experience with ETL/integration tools or frameworks (SSIS, Talend, Informatica, Fivetran) and troubleshooting data pipelines.
  • Scripting and automation using Python, PowerShell, Bash, or similar languages to schedule and automate database maintenance.
  • Knowledge of data modeling principles, normalization/denormalization trade-offs, and creating/maintaining data dictionaries.
  • Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic) and alert configuration.
  • Working knowledge of security controls (encryption, role-based access control, audit logging) and regulatory compliance related to data.
  • Familiarity with source control and CI/CD processes for database schema changes (Git, Liquibase, Flyway).
  • Ability to work with virtualization and container platforms (VMware, Docker, Kubernetes) where databases are containerized or part of microservices.
  • Experience with high-availability and replication technologies (Always On, streaming replication, clustering) and failover testing.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management: able to translate technical constraints into business-impact language and coordinate across teams.
  • Excellent written documentation skills for runbooks, procedures, and change records.
  • Effective problem-solving under pressure with a methodical, evidence-driven mindset.
  • Strong attention to detail and discipline with change control and audit requirements.
  • Clear verbal communication for incident coordination, post-incident reviews, and training sessions.
  • Time management and prioritization to balance operational support, projects, and continuous improvement.
  • Collaborative mindset: experience working in cross-functional agile teams and mentoring junior colleagues.
  • Proactive continuous learner who stays current with database technologies, cloud offerings, and best practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline OR equivalent practical experience in database administration and operations.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a related field.
  • Relevant certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator, Oracle Database Administrator certification, AWS Certified Database – Specialty, or vendor-neutral certifications (e.g., CompTIA Server+, CompTIA Security+).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 2–5 years of hands-on database administration, data operations, or related IT/sysadmin experience.

Preferred: 3–7 years of experience managing production databases, cloud-managed database services, ETL processes, backups/recovery, and exposure to data governance/compliance initiatives. Prior experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, government) is a strong plus.

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