Sr. Database Administrator

About the role

Vimo is a national leader in state-based health insurance exchanges and safety-net transformations. We partner with state agencies across the country to expand access to affordable health coverage and modernize the delivery of essential human services, including Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, child care, child support, child welfare, and unemployment insurance. Our enterprise-grade SaaS platforms power mission-critical systems that serve millions of people every day. By combining cutting-edge technology with process optimization, we help states deliver vital public benefits efficiently, securely, and at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain PostgreSQL database clusters in production, staging, and development environments.
• Ensure high availability and disaster recovery through replication (streaming, logical), failover strategies, and backup/restore procedures.
• Maintain database performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement query optimization, indexing strategies, and configuration tuning.
• Implement best practices of DB maintenance.
• Plan and execute database upgrades, migrations, and major version transitions with minimal downtime.
• Implement and enforce database security best practices including role-based access control, encryption at rest and in transit, and audit logging.
• Automate routine DBA tasks (backups, monitoring, alerting, provisioning) using scripting (Bash, Python) and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Jenkins, GitActions or similar).
• Collaborate with application development teams on schema design, data modeling, and query performance reviews.
• Manage PostgreSQL in cloud environments (AWS RDS, Aurora PostgreSQL, or equivalent).
• Establish and maintain database standards, documentation, and operational runbooks.
• Participate in on-call rotation for production database incidents and lead root cause analysis for database-related outages.
• Evaluate and implement PostgreSQL extensions (e.g. PostGIS, pg_partman, Citus, pgvector, etc.) as needed.
• Capacity planning and storage management to support business growth.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience as a PostgreSQL DBA in production environments.
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL internals including MVCC, WAL, vacuum, replication, and connection pooling (PgBouncer, Pgpool-II or similar).
• Strong experience with performance tuning, query optimization, and EXPLAIN/ANALYZE interpretation.
• Proficiency in backup and recovery tools (pg_dump, pg_basebackup, pgBackRest, Barman).
• Experience with high-availability architectures (Patroni, repmgr, or equivalent).
• Solid Linux/Unix administration skills.
• Scripting proficiency in Bash, Python, or similar languages for automation.
• Experience with cloud-hosted PostgreSQL (AWS RDS/Aurora, GCP Cloud SQL, or Azure Database for PostgreSQL).
• Strong understanding of database security, compliance, and access management.

Bonus Skills

• Experience supporting databases in regulated industries (healthcare, government, or financial services).
• Familiarity with HIPAA, FedRAMP, or SOC 2 compliance requirements as they pertain to data management.
• Experience with database CI/CD pipelines and schema migration tools (Flyway, Liquibase, or Alembic).
• Knowledge of containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) for PostgreSQL.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, pganalyze, pg_stat_statements).
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• PostgreSQL certification or contributions to the PostgreSQL community.
• Experience with data warehousing, ETL pipelines, or analytical workloads on PostgreSQL.
• Familiarity with other database systems (MySQL, MongoDB, Redis) is a plus.