Senior Database Administrator – Microsoft SQL Server & PostgreSQL

ABOUT CODEBASE TECHNOLOGIES

Codebase Technologies is a global digital banking technology company that empowers banks, financial institutions, and fintechs to launch, transform, and scale innovative financial services. Through its award-winning Digibanc™ platform, Codebase delivers cloud-native, API-first solutions spanning digital banking, core banking, lending, onboarding, payments, and embedded finance for both conventional and Islamic institutions. With digital banking and financial propositions delivered across 19 countries, Codebase combines deep industry expertise with cutting-edge technology to help shape the future of banking.

Role Purpose

The Senior Database Administrator will own database reliability, availability, performance, security, recoverability, and operational standards across Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL environments.

This is a hands-on senior role for someone who can design and build database environments from scratch, troubleshoot complex production issues, guide clients and infrastructure partners, and establish consistent operational practices across projects.

The successful candidate must be capable of taking end-to-end ownership—from architecture and installation through monitoring, performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, maintenance, production support, and continuous improvement.

Primary Responsibilities

1. Microsoft SQL Server Architecture and Implementation

• Design, install, configure, patch, upgrade, and maintain enterprise SQL Server environments.
• Build SQL Server environments from the ground up, including instance configuration, storage layout, service accounts, ports, security, memory allocation, CPU settings, tempdb, and operational jobs.
• Design and implement Windows Server Failover Clustering and SQL Server Always On Availability Groups.
• Configure and troubleshoot availability replicas, synchronization modes, quorum, failover policies, endpoints, and Availability Group listeners.
• Define listener, DNS, IP, subnet, firewall, load-balancing, routing, and application-connectivity requirements with client infrastructure teams.
• Design multi-site, disaster-recovery, and read-only workload-routing solutions.
• Plan and execute controlled failover and disaster-recovery exercises.
• Support standalone, clustered, virtualized, on-premises, cloud, and hybrid SQL Server deployments.
• Conduct health checks and configuration comparisons across database nodes to identify inconsistencies in patch levels, memory, parallelism, storage, tempdb, and other settings.

2. SQL Server Performance Monitoring and Optimization

• Establish proactive monitoring for expensive, long-running, blocking, high-CPU, high-I/O, and high-memory queries.
• Use Query Store, execution plans, Extended Events, DMVs, wait statistics, blocking and deadlock analysis, and other diagnostic capabilities to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Analyze execution plans for poor cardinality estimates, memory-grant problems, spills, scans, expensive sorts, hash operations, spools, parameter sensitivity, and inefficient parallelism.
• Troubleshoot sustained CPU, memory, storage, and transaction-log pressure and distinguish infrastructure-capacity problems from query, schema, or configuration problems.
• Investigate abnormal tempdb growth and determine whether consumption is caused by user objects, internal objects, version-store activity, query spills, index operations, or long-running transactions.
• Configure and maintain tempdb based on workload requirements, including file count, equal file sizing, initial sizing, autogrowth, disk placement, and capacity thresholds.
• Diagnose blocking, deadlocks, latch contention, excessive waits, failed jobs, slow transactions, and database connectivity issues.
• Recommend and validate query rewrites, indexing changes, statistics updates, configuration changes, and resource-capacity improvements.
• Establish performance baselines and capacity forecasts for database growth, CPU, memory, IOPS, storage, transaction logs, and backup requirements.
• Work with application teams to prevent recurring heavy-query and high-DML performance problems rather than relying on restarts, shrinking, or additional infrastructure as temporary workarounds.

3. Indexing, Fragmentation and Statistics Management

• Design and implement database maintenance jobs for index optimization, statistics updates, integrity checks, backups, cleanup, and operational reporting.
• Establish workload-appropriate thresholds for index reorganization, rebuilds, and statistics updates rather than applying uniform rules to every database.
• Analyze rapidly recurring fragmentation, page splits, wide-table design, clustering-key selection, fill factor, index usage, and high-DML access patterns.
• Tune fill factor selectively for frequently modified indexes while evaluating the storage, cache, and I/O trade-offs.
• Review duplicate, overlapping, unused, missing, and excessively wide indexes.
• Plan index-maintenance windows that minimize blocking, replication impact, transaction-log growth, Availability Group latency, and production disruption.
• Measure the business and query-performance impact of fragmentation rather than treating the fragmentation percentage alone as the success criterion.

4. Table Partitioning and Data Lifecycle Management

• Design, implement, and maintain table and index partitioning strategies for large and high-volume databases.
• Define appropriate partition keys, functions, schemes, filegroups, boundaries, and retention models.
• Implement sliding-window strategies, partition switching, archival, purging, and future-partition creation.
• Perform partition-level index and statistics maintenance where appropriate.
• Ensure aligned indexes and validate the impact of partitioning on query plans, replication, backups, storage, and operational jobs.
• Review existing partitioned tables to confirm that partition elimination is occurring and that the implementation provides measurable operational or performance value.
• Coordinate partition changes carefully for high-DML and replicated tables.

5. Backup, Recovery and Disaster Recovery

• Define backup and recovery strategies based on agreed Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives.
• Implement and monitor full, differential, transaction-log, copy-only, and PostgreSQL physical or logical backups as appropriate.
• Configure backup encryption, compression, retention, off-site storage, cleanup, alerting, and access controls.
• Regularly test restores and maintain evidence that databases can be recovered within agreed targets.
• Prepare documented recovery procedures for database corruption, accidental deletion, infrastructure failure, Availability Group failure, and site-level disaster.
• Validate transaction-log chains, backup integrity, recovery models, point-in-time recovery, and backup-storage capacity.
• Ensure backup success is not treated as proof of recoverability without periodic restoration testing.

6. PostgreSQL Administration

• Design, install, configure, upgrade, patch, and maintain PostgreSQL database environments.
• Build and maintain highly available PostgreSQL clusters using streaming replication and suitable cluster-management or failover technologies.
• Configure primary and standby nodes, replication slots, WAL management, synchronous or asynchronous replication, connection routing, and failover procedures.
• Understand and administer technologies such as Patroni, etcd/Consul, repmgr, pgBouncer, HAProxy, or equivalent solutions.
• Implement PostgreSQL backup and point-in-time recovery using appropriate technologies such as pgBackRest, Barman, native utilities, or approved enterprise tools.
• Monitor replication lag, WAL growth, connection consumption, locks, long-running transactions, checkpoint behavior, table and index bloat, storage growth, and database health.
• Tune PostgreSQL configuration parameters based on workload, memory, CPU, storage, concurrency, and recovery requirements.
• Analyze slow queries using pg_stat_statements, EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE, PostgreSQL logs, wait events, and relevant monitoring tools.
• Manage VACUUM, autovacuum, ANALYZE, REINDEX, statistics, bloat, and routine maintenance.
• Administer PostgreSQL roles, permissions, authentication, TLS, certificates, auditing, and security hardening.
• Plan and test PostgreSQL failover, switchover, recovery, major-version upgrades, and rollback procedures.

7. Database Security and Compliance

• Establish secure database configuration standards for SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
• Implement least-privilege access, role-based permissions, privileged-account controls, password and authentication standards, and periodic access reviews.
• Configure and support encryption at rest and encryption in transit, including certificate lifecycle and expiry monitoring.
• Work with application teams to validate encrypted connection settings, driver compatibility, listener certificates, and certificate trust.
• Support database auditing, security reviews, vulnerability remediation, and regulatory evidence requirements.
• Maintain secure service accounts, database links, linked servers, replication accounts, backup credentials, and monitoring accounts.
• Ensure database credentials and other secrets are managed through approved secret-management solutions.

8. Replication, Integration and Connectivity

• Configure, monitor, and troubleshoot SQL Server transactional replication and other approved data-distribution mechanisms.
• Assess the effect of schema, index, and partitioning changes on replicated databases.
• Diagnose replication latency, agent failures, data inconsistencies, transaction-log growth, and subscriber performance.
• Troubleshoot database logins, drivers, connection strings, DNS, listener routing, firewall rules, TLS trust, and connection-pooling problems.
• Maintain an inventory of applications, jobs, monitoring systems, linked servers, reporting services, batch processes, and other database clients.

9. Client and Partner Technical Leadership

• Act as the senior database authority for internal teams, implementation partners, and client infrastructure teams.
• Define minimum standards and reference architectures for production, non-production, high-availability, and disaster-recovery database environments.
• Review database designs proposed by clients or partners and identify availability, performance, security, capacity, backup, and supportability risks.
• Provide clear build guides, configuration baselines, maintenance standards, monitoring requirements, backup policies, and operational runbooks.
• Challenge unsafe designs and incomplete implementations using technical evidence and business-impact analysis.
• Lead technical workshops covering cluster architecture, listener configuration, failover, backups, monitoring, maintenance, partitioning, security, and recovery.
• Guide less-experienced DBAs and provide structured knowledge transfer to support and delivery teams.
• Take ownership of complex database incidents through diagnosis, remediation, root-cause analysis, and permanent corrective action.

Operational Ownership

The role will be expected to establish and maintain:

• SQL Server and PostgreSQL installation and configuration standards.
• High-availability and disaster-recovery reference architectures.
• Database build and handover checklists.
• Backup, restore, and recovery procedures.
• Index, statistics, VACUUM, integrity-check, and cleanup schedules.
• Performance baselines and capacity dashboards.
• Expensive-query, blocking, deadlock, replication-lag, storage, backup, and cluster-health alerts.
• Database security and access-control standards.
• Patch, upgrade, certificate-renewal, and lifecycle plans.
• Production incident and root-cause-analysis procedures.
• Client-facing database assessment and readiness reports.

Required Experience

• At least 10 years of database administration experience, including significant responsibility for business-critical production systems.
• At least 7 years of strong, hands-on Microsoft SQL Server administration experience.
• Demonstrable experience building SQL Server environments and high-availability solutions from scratch.
• Advanced experience with Windows Server Failover Clustering, Always On Availability Groups, listeners, quorum, and multi-node failover.
• Strong SQL Server performance-tuning experience covering Query Store, execution plans, DMVs, wait statistics, blocking, deadlocks, indexing, statistics, memory, parallelism, tempdb, and transaction logs.
• Strong experience implementing and validating enterprise backup, recovery, and disaster-recovery strategies.
• Practical experience managing large, partitioned, high-DML, and high-transaction-volume databases.
• Hands-on PostgreSQL administration experience, including cluster setup, replication, backup, recovery, maintenance, monitoring, and performance troubleshooting.
• Strong T-SQL skills and sufficient PostgreSQL/SQL and scripting skills to automate operational activities.
• Experience working directly with infrastructure, application, security, DevOps, vendor, and client teams.
• Proven ability to lead production incidents and communicate technical findings to both technical and management audiences.
• Experience producing architecture documents, implementation guides, operating procedures, health-check reports, and root-cause analyses.

Preferred Experience

• Experience in banking, fintech, payment processing, or another regulated and high-availability industry.
• Experience supporting geographically distributed production and disaster-recovery sites.
• Experience with SQL Server transactional replication.
• Experience with Azure SQL technologies, SQL Server on Azure virtual machines, or comparable cloud platforms.
• Experience with database monitoring platforms such as Redgate, SolarWinds, Dynatrace, SCOM, Grafana/Prometheus, or equivalent tools.
• Experience automating database builds, configuration validation, maintenance, and health checks.
• Relevant Microsoft, PostgreSQL, cloud, or infrastructure certifications.

Personal Attributes

• Strong ownership mentality and willingness to drive issues through to permanent resolution.
• Able to remain hands-on while providing architectural and operational leadership.
• Evidence-driven and capable of separating symptoms from root causes.
• Comfortable challenging clients or partners when database designs or operating practices create unacceptable risk.
• Methodical, detail-oriented, and disciplined in production change management.
• Able to explain complex database risks in clear business language.
• Strong mentoring, documentation, stakeholder-management, and incident-leadership skills.
• Proactive in identifying risks before they become production incidents.

Measures of Success

• Availability and database-service reliability against agreed targets.
• Successful backup rate and independently verified restore success.
• Recovery Point Objective and Recovery Time Objective compliance.
• Reduction in repeat database incidents and emergency node restarts.
• Reduction in high-impact blocking, deadlocks, uncontrolled tempdb growth, and recurring heavy-query incidents.
• Improved response time for critical queries and workloads.
• Availability Group and PostgreSQL replication health and failover-test success.
• Completion of maintenance, patching, certificate renewal, recovery testing, and capacity reviews within agreed schedules.
• Closure of client database-readiness risks before production go-live.
• Quality and adoption of database standards, runbooks, and operational documentation.

Why Join Us?

At Codebase Technologies, you’ll have the opportunity to work on impactful projects that redefine financial services across emerging and developed markets. We foster a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning, empowering our people to solve complex challenges, grow their careers, and contribute to building the next generation of digital banking experiences.

To apply or refer a candidate: careers@codebtech.com