Database Administrator

About the Role  

We're looking for an experienced Database Administrator to assess and stabilize database operations for a client engagement spanning MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. This role starts with a clear-eyed look at what's actually in place — access models, backup posture, monitoring coverage, and operational ownership — and moves quickly into fixing what's fragile and documenting what's not.  

The ideal candidate has run production databases under real pressure, knows the difference between a backup that exists and one that's been proven to restore, and can turn a messy current state into a prioritized, actionable plan.   

What you'll do  

Assess the current state  

• Review database management practices, access model, and operational ownership  

• Evaluate monitoring coverage, backup posture, and routine maintenance  

• Identify performance concerns and the issues that need stabilizing first  

• Turn the findings into a clear, prioritized picture the client can act on  

Implement & Fix 

• Find the cause of problems in stored procedures, functions, triggers, and views: wrong results, bad data written, NULL handling errors, implicit data type 

conversion, missing ORDER BY, and incomplete transaction or error handling. 

• Reproduce the problem on a restored copy before changing production. 

• Make the smallest change that fixes it, and say what else the change affects. 

• Add a test that proves the fix and catches it if it comes back. 

• Tell the difference between a database code problem, a data problem, and an application problem, and send the ones that are not database problems to the 

right team. 

• Put agreed operational hygiene practices in place across both platforms  

• Recommend and apply performance tuning, optimizing queries that cost the most, fixing deadlocks, adding missing indexes and improving waits. 

• Verify backups and test recovery — confirm they work, don't assume it  

• Improve monitoring and alerting so problems surface before users report them  

• Triage and resolve incidents as they come up  

• Document what exists, what changed, and how to run it  

What you'll bring  

• Solid production DBA experience with both MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server  

• Experience working with legacy databases and strong experience coding and debugging store procedures. 

• Backup and recovery: design, validation, and real restore testing  

• Query and index tuning, execution plan analysis, wait statistics  

• Monitoring and alerting setup on either platform  

• Comfort with database security and access models — roles, least privilege, auditing  

• Clear written documentation. Runbooks that someone else can follow