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Vestwell is expanding and we’re excited about adding a Senior Database Administrator (DBA) who is passionate about building reliable, secure, and scalable data platforms in a modern cloud-first environment. At a high level, we’re looking for a senior technical contributor who can own the health, performance, and evolution of our core relational databases that power our retirement and savings platforms.
Job Responsibility:
Production ownership & reliability: Own the uptime, performance, and operational health of production databases (primarily PostgreSQL or similar RDBMS)
Design and maintain high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies, including replication, backups, and point-in-time recovery (PITR)
Participate in and help mature our incident management, on-call, and post-incident review practices
Performance tuning & optimization: Analyze and tune slow queries, indexes, and execution plans to support low-latency, high-throughput workloads
Proactively monitor and optimize database configuration, connection management, and resource utilization
Partner with engineering teams on schema design, query patterns, and migration strategies to ensure long-term scalability
Architecture, design, & lifecycle management: Design and evolve database schemas, data models, and partitioning strategies to support new products and high-growth data volumes
Plan and execute major upgrades, migrations, and refactors with minimal impact to customers and internal stakeholders
Collaborate with DevOps and platform teams on infrastructure choices (e.g., managed cloud databases, storage, networking) and capacity planning
Security, compliance, & governance: Implement and maintain strong database security controls, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and auditing
Work closely with Security, Compliance, and Risk teams to align database practices with regulatory and internal standards
Define and enforce guardrails for access patterns, data handling, and least-privilege principles across teams
Automation, tooling, & observability: Automate routine DBA tasks (provisioning, backups, failover, schema migrations, user management, guardrails) using scripting and infrastructure-as-code tools
Define and maintain monitoring, alerting, and logging standards for database systems, including SLOs and capacity thresholds
Contribute to internal tooling, runbooks, and documentation to improve operational efficiency and reduce toil
Cross-functional partnership & mentorship: Partner with application engineers, data engineers, and DevOps to design end-to-end solutions that balance performance, reliability, and developer ergonomics
Provide guidance and best practices for SQL, data modeling, and database usage to engineering teams
Mentor other engineers in database fundamentals, operational excellence, and production readiness
Requirements:
5+ years of professional experience as a Database Administrator or in a closely related role, with significant ownership of production relational databases
Deep expertise in at least one major RDBMS, preferably PostgreSQL (e.g., configuration, performance tuning, query optimization, replication, and backup/restore)
Hands-on experience in a cloud environment (e.g., AWS RDS/Aurora, GCP Cloud SQL, Azure Database), including designing for availability, scalability, and cost efficiency
Strong SQL skills and familiarity with at least one procedural language such as PL/pgSQL, T-SQL, or equivalent
Implementing and managing backup and recovery strategies in production
Performance troubleshooting using query plans, profiling, and monitoring tools
Experience with monitoring and observability tools for databases (e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch, Prometheus, or similar), including defining meaningful alerts and SLOs
Practical experience with schema design and data modeling to support application and analytics use cases
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, or similar) and scripting in languages such as Python, Bash, or similar
Ability to work cross-functionally with engineers, security, and operations teams, communicating complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
A strong sense of ownership, attention to detail, and a bias toward documenting systems, decisions, and runbooks
Nice to have:
Experience operating PostgreSQL at scale in a high-traffic, regulated, or mission-critical environment (e.g., fintech, banking, payments, benefits platforms)
Exposure to data warehousing and analytics ecosystems (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery) and their integration with operational databases
Familiarity with NoSQL or specialized data stores (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch) and how they complement relational databases
Background with CI/CD pipelines for database changes, including migration tooling, automated checks, and rollout strategies
Knowledge of networking fundamentals relevant to database operations (e.g., VPC design, security groups, private networking, peering)
Experience contributing to capacity planning and long-term data growth strategies, including partitioning, archiving, and lifecycle management
Prior experience in a startup or high-growth environment where you have helped scale systems and processes
What we offer:
Competitive health coverage
Generous vacation offering
Hybrid office policy
Bright, comfortable office with many workspace options in our Midtown Manhattan, Austin, King of Prussia, and Phoenix offices
Great 401(k) plan
Eligible to participate in the Company Bonus Pool
Eligible to receive new hire equity in the Company