Principal Database Administrator (DBA)
What You Will Be Doing
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Own Database Reliability: Drive high availability and disaster recovery strategies, ensuring RPO/RTO targets are met for our core banking systems.
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Architect for Scale: Define and execute the scalability roadmap, including partitioning, sharding strategies, and capacity forecasting.
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Optimize Performance: Perform deep-dive query optimization, execution plan analysis, and proactive bottleneck remediation.
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Design Infrastructure: Build and manage scalable inference and connection pooling strategies (PgBouncer) and robust backup/restore automations.
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Establish Observability: Design the monitoring architecture (Prometheus, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics) and define SLIs/SLOs for database health.
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Champion Security: Implement banking-grade security practices, including credential management and compliance-aligned data handling.
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Partner Across Engineering: Work with product teams to ensure database schema changes and architectural decisions support a high-load environment.
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Lead by Example: Set the technical bar for the DBA function through mentoring, standards definition, and hands-on implementation.
Who You Are
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Technical Authority: You possess a deep, "under-the-hood" understanding of PostgreSQL internals (MVCC, WAL, vacuum, etc.)
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Reliability-First: You understand that in fintech, data integrity and availability are non-negotiable.
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Pragmatic Architect: You can turn complex business requirements into robust, scalable data models.
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Autonomous Leader: You are comfortable taking full ownership of the database landscape without heavy supervision.
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Clear Communicator: You can explain complex architectural trade-offs to both engineers and stakeholders.
Must-Haves
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5+ years of experience as a PostgreSQL DBA in high-load, production environments (preferably Fintech or mission-critical systems).
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Deep PostgreSQL Expertise: Advanced knowledge of index design (B-tree, GIN, GiST, BRIN), partitioning, and vacuum tuning.
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HA/DR Mastery: Proven experience designing streaming replication, clustering, and automated backup validation.
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Cloud Fluency: Hands-on experience with cloud-managed PostgreSQL (specifically GCP) and Linux systems administration.
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Automation Mindset: Proficient with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD workflows (GitLab, ArgoCD).
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Strong SQL Skills: Expertise in complex queries, stored procedures, and functions.
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Observability Stack: Experience building monitoring and alerting for databases (Prometheus/Grafana).
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Fluent English
Nice-to-Haves
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Compliance Experience: Working within frameworks like PCI DSS or GDPR.
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Multi-Stack Experience: Familiarity with Redis, BigQuery, or additional data systems (Cassandra, ClickHouse).
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Advanced Tooling: Experience with various connection pooling tools beyond PgBouncer.
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Security Pro: Deep knowledge of secure secrets and credential management practices.
Our Infrastructure Landscape
- GCP (primary cloud, ~90%)
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GKE (Kubernetes)
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GitLab CI
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Terraform
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ArgoCD (GitOps)
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Kafka (Confluent)
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Vault
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Prometheus / Grafana
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Cloud Logging
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PostgreSQL
