Senior Database Administrator

What You'll Do

• Reliability & Performance
  • Operate and evolve multi-region CockroachDB clusters and PostgreSQL instances across production, staging, and development.
  • Investigate contention, serialization retries (SQLSTATE 40001), and range hotspots in the transaction paths behind bets, wagers, settlements, and payouts.
  • Diagnose leaseholder placement, monotonic-key write pressure, and cross-region latency that turn one query into several network round trips.
  • Trace a slow query to its execution plan, the plan to optimizer behavior, and the behavior to the schema or application call path that caused it.
  • Catch plan regressions after statistics changes, schema changes, data growth, or releases, then turn the fix into a safer rollout pattern.
  • Assess schema-change and backfill risk before it reaches large tables: lock behavior, retry pressure, capacity impact, and rollback path.
  • Plan capacity, scaling events, and version upgrades that customers don't feel.
• Observability & Incident Response
  • Build database observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, Loki, and Snowflake: dashboards backed by real queries, alerting on leading indicators, and SLO tracking.
  • Connect database symptoms to application behavior and business events so alerts point at causes.
  • Join the on-call rota for the data layer, lead incident analysis when the database is part of the failure, and drive blameless postmortems toward durable fixes.
  • Instrument the system to surface degradation before it becomes an incident.
• Automation & Tooling
  • Build Go and Python tools that make incidents easier to understand: log collectors, explain-plan analyzers, migration checks, capacity models, and runbook generators.
  • Automate provisioning, configuration, backup, and recovery with Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools.
  • Work with platform engineering on CI/CD, deployment safety, and change management for database-touching services.
• AI-Augmented Engineering
  • Use Claude Code, Codex, and similar harnesses in daily work to investigate incidents, generate probes, draft runbooks, and write tooling.
  • Keep the harness grounded in logs, traces, metrics, and source code, and verify its output against production facts before you ship it.
  • Evaluate AI-assisted observability and anomaly detection, and share what works with the team.
• Security & Compliance
  • Implement and audit access controls, authentication, authorization, and encryption in transit and at rest.
  • Support data-protection, audit-logging, and retention requirements for a regulated gaming platform.
• Standards & Mentorship
  • Build a database center of excellence: documentation, standards, and reusable patterns that other teams build against.
  • Mentor engineers on database fundamentals, distributed-systems behavior, and operational discipline.
  • Bring what you learn back to the team.

What Are We Looking For?

• 5+ years operating production relational databases as a DBA, Database Reliability Engineer, or Data Platform Engineer.
• Deep production experience with PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, or another relational database management system, with fluency in the tradeoffs behind isolation, consensus, locality, and query planning.
• You understand how a SQL engine works under the hood: MVCC, the Volcano iterator execution model, and cost-based optimizer frameworks such as Cascades. You apply that knowledge to indexing strategy and to execution plan analysis.
• Working knowledge of distributed-systems fundamentals: consensus (Raft and Paxos), distributed transactions, consistency models, and failure modes.
• You write tools and automation in Python or Go, and you can debug and suggest fixes to line-of-business code in Java or a similar language.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code and a monitoring and observability stack such as Grafana or Datadog.
• UNIX/Linux administration with shell scripting, comfort on a cloud platform (AWS preferred, Azure, or GCP welcome), and willingness to join an on-call rota.
• Clear technical writing and speech. You'll work across teams.