Database Advisor

About the role

The Database Advisor will provide technical leadership in the design, implementation, maintenance, and optimization of enterprise database solutions. This individual will support large-scale database development and administration efforts, perform root cause analysis, ensure data quality and appropriate database usage, and serve as a key liaison between business customers, development teams, and support groups.

Responsibilities

• Provide leadership and initiative in the overall coordination of high level and detailed design deliverables including designs for technical architecture and system interfaces to meet business requirements/specifications for significant projects.
• Apply specialized technical knowledge to advise other teams and recommend solutions to technical design problems.
• Lead and/or assist in resolution of complex production problems.
• Mentor development of those in less senior positions.

Requirements

• Strong experience with database administration, database design, implementation, maintenance, troubleshooting, and performance optimization across enterprise environments.
• Experience supporting large-scale production database environments, enterprise applications, and modernization initiatives.
• Strong understanding of relational and NoSQL database concepts, including data modeling, schema design, indexing strategies, query optimization, and database performance tuning.
• Deep expertise with PostgreSQL, including enterprise features, extensions, vacuum tuning, and performance optimization. Experience with Google AlloyDB is highly preferred.
• Strong experience provisioning and managing cloud database infrastructure, including Cloud SQL, AlloyDB, Spanner, and related Google Cloud database services using Terraform.
• Experience designing and managing horizontally scalable cloud database architectures, including Google Cloud Spanner, with a focus on high availability, global consistency, and resilience.
• Hands-on experience planning and executing minimal-downtime database migrations utilizing Google Cloud Database Migration Service (DMS), Datastream, Oracle GoldenGate, or comparable migration technologies.
• Experience evaluating and migrating legacy relational database platforms such as Oracle or SQL Server to cloud-native PostgreSQL or AlloyDB environments.
• Proficiency with Python, Bash, or Go for database automation, operational scripting, maintenance, and custom tooling.
• Experience implementing database observability, monitoring, alerting, and dashboarding using Google Cloud Monitoring, Monitoring Query Language (MQL), Cloud Logging, Error Reporting, or comparable observability platforms.
• Experience optimizing cloud database infrastructure costs through capacity planning, rightsizing, storage optimization, autoscaling strategies, and cloud commitment planning (FinOps).
• Familiarity with cloud security best practices, including IAM database authentication, Cloud KMS, Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK), encryption at rest, and secure database access controls.
• Experience supporting containerized database environments utilizing Kubernetes (GKE) and cloud-native deployment patterns.
• Ability to perform complex root cause analysis, troubleshoot enterprise database issues, and implement long-term corrective actions.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, documentation, and technical communication skills.
• Ability to partner effectively with business users, application development teams, infrastructure engineers, support organizations, and technical leadership.
• Experience establishing database governance, quality control, auditing standards, and data management best practices.
• Demonstrated leadership, ownership, and mentoring skills with the ability to guide junior DBAs, manage competing priorities, and successfully deliver enterprise database initiatives.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree, in computer science, engineering, information system or related field and/or equivalent formal training or work experience.
• Requires five (5) or more years qualifying work experience in information technology or engineering environment. A related advanced degree may offset the related experience requirements.