Senior Database Administrator

Peraton is seeking a Senior Database Administrator (DBA) focused on the operational reliability of database platforms across AWS Commercial and AWS GovCloud environments. This is a hands-on role that combines software engineering practices with database operations to ensure data platforms are reliable, scalable, secure, and highly available.

The Senior DBA will define and monitor SLIs and SLOs for database services and own their reliability, availability, performance, capacity planning, recoverability, and operational lifecycle. The role will lead incident response, perform root-cause analysis, and drive automation that reduces manual work and eliminates operational toil. This person will also partner closely with platform engineering, security, and application development teams to ensure database services meet application requirements and security standards and are delivered in a consistent, reliable, and supportable manner.

Work Location: Remote

Shift Schedule: 8am – 5pm Eastern Standard Time (EST)

What you will do:

• Operate production databases on AWS, including RDS and Aurora (PostgreSQL and MySQL), as well as self-managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server on VMs as needed.
• Administer DynamoDB, ElastiCache (Redis), and OpenSearch supporting application workloads and caching.
• Own database architecture, performance tuning, capacity planning, and right-sizing.
• Manage backup, restore, snapshot, and point-in-time recovery strategies, and validate RTO/RPO through scheduled restore and failover testing.
• Design, test, and maintain high-availability and disaster recovery solutions, including Multi-AZ, cross-region replication, and documented failover procedures.
• Define and maintain SLIs/SLOs for database availability, latency, replication lag, and query performance.
• Monitor and tune database performance using Dynatrace, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry, including query performance, saturation, replication health, alerting, and automated remediation.
• Lead production incident response, including troubleshooting, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and post-incident corrective actions.
• Manage the database lifecycle, including upgrades, patching, configuration changes, maintenance, and technology refreshes.
• Improve database resilience through capacity planning, performance testing, failure-mode analysis, disaster recovery, and recovery testing.
• Identify and address reliability risks and technical debt using reliability metrics, incident trends, capacity data, and service health indicators.
• Automate database operations using an everything-as-code approach to improve consistency, repeatability, testing, recovery, and efficiency.
• Partner with Platform Engineering and application teams to define operational requirements, improve reusable infrastructure, and strengthen database reliability and operability.

Technologies and Skillsets:

• AWS data services (RDS, Aurora for PostgreSQL and MySQL, DynamoDB, ElastiCache) and core services (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, KMS, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch)
• Relational database administration: PostgreSQL and MySQL, with Oracle or SQL Server experience valued
• Advanced SQL, query optimization, execution plan analysis, and index and schema design
• High availability, replication, backup and recovery, and disaster recovery design and testing
• Dynatrace, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry for database and application observability
• Terraform and Ansible / Ansible Tower for infrastructure and configuration automation
• GitLab, Jenkins, and database schema migration tooling such as Liquibase or Flyway
• Sonatype Nexus and Aqua Security
• Python, Bash, or Go
• RHEL Linux administration
• Windows Server

Basic Qualifications

• Must be a U.S. Citizen with the ability to obtain and maintain the required Public Trust level clearance.
• Bachelor's degree and 8 years of experience, a Master's degree with 6 years of experience, or a High School Diploma or equivalent and 12 years of experience.
• 5+ years of database administration, data platform engineering, or SRE experience with significant production database ownership.
• Hands-on production experience operating database services on AWS at scale.
• DoD 8570/8140 compliant certification.
• Demonstrated experience with backup, recovery, and disaster recovery execution, including validated restore testing.
• Demonstrated experience defining and implementing SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets for data services.
• Proven incident management experience, including on-call ownership and root-cause analysis.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and strong communication, with the ability to present performance and reliability insights to technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• AWS Certified Database Specialty, Solutions Architect, or SysOps Administrator.
• PostgreSQL or MySQL professional certification.
• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or experience running stateful workloads on Kubernetes or OpenShift (ROSA).
• Dynatrace or Datadog vendor certification.
• Experience with database automation at scale, including fleet-wide patching and self-service provisioning.
• Experience operating multi-tenant data platforms with tenant isolation and noisy-neighbor mitigation.
• Experience supporting FedRAMP, FISMA, or DoD-accredited environments.