Role PurposeWe are seeking an experienced Senior Database Administrator to take end-to-end ownership of database reliability, availability, performance, security, backup, recovery, and operational standards across Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL environments.

This is a hands-on senior role requiring expertise in designing and building database environments from scratch, implementing high availability and disaster recovery, troubleshooting complex production issues, and establishing consistent database operations across projects.

The successful candidate will lead database architecture, implementation, monitoring, performance optimization, maintenance, production support, and continuous improvement while working closely with clients, infrastructure teams, application teams, and implementation partners.

Key Responsibilities1. SQL Server Architecture and Administration

- Design, install, configure, patch, upgrade, and maintain enterprise SQL Server environments across on-premises, virtualized, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures.
- Build database environments from scratch, including instance configuration, storage, service accounts, security, memory, CPU, tempdb, ports, and operational jobs.
- Design, implement, and troubleshoot Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server Always On Availability Groups.
- Manage availability replicas, synchronization modes, quorum, failover policies, listeners, DNS, IPs, subnets, firewall rules, and application connectivity.
- Design multi-site high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions, including read-only workload routing.
- Perform database health checks, configuration comparisons, controlled failovers, and DR exercises.

2.

Performance

Monitoring and Optimization
- Proactively identify expensive queries, blocking, deadlocks, high CPU/I/O/memory consumption, long-running transactions, and database connectivity issues.
- Use Query Store, execution plans, Extended Events, DMVs, wait statistics, and diagnostic tools to identify root causes.
- Troubleshoot cardinality estimation, memory grants, query spills, parallelism, scans, sorts, hash operations, parameter sensitivity, and latch contention.
- Diagnose tempdb growth, transaction-log pressure, storage bottlenecks, failed jobs, and resource-capacity issues.
- Optimize queries, indexes, statistics, configuration, and resource allocation in collaboration with application and infrastructure teams.
- Establish performance baselines and capacity forecasts for CPU, memory, IOPS, storage, logs, backups, and database growth.
- Address recurring performance issues through permanent corrective actions rather than temporary workarounds such as unnecessary restarts or database shrinking.

3. Indexing, Maintenance and Partitioning
- Develop and maintain database maintenance jobs for index optimization, statistics updates, integrity checks, backups, cleanup, and reporting.
- Define workload-specific index rebuild/reorganization and statistics-update strategies.
- Analyze fragmentation, page splits, index usage, duplicate or overlapping indexes, fill factor, clustering keys, and high-DML workloads.
- Design and maintain table and index partitioning for large, high-volume databases, including partition functions, schemes, filegroups, and retention policies.
- Implement sliding-window strategies, partition switching, archival, purging, and partition-level maintenance.




- Validate partition elimination and assess the impact of maintenance and partition changes on query performance, replication, transaction logs, and availability.

4. Backup, Recovery and Disaster Recovery
- Design and implement backup and recovery strategies aligned with agreed Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
- Manage full, differential, transaction-log, PostgreSQL physical/logical, and other appropriate backups.
- Implement encryption, compression, retention, off-site storage, monitoring, alerting, and backup-access controls.
- Conduct regular restore and point-in-time recovery tests, validate backup integrity and transaction-log chains, and maintain recovery evidence.
- Develop documented recovery procedures for data corruption, accidental deletion, infrastructure failure, cluster failure, and site-level disasters.

5. PostgreSQL Administration
- Install, configure, patch, upgrade, and maintain PostgreSQL environments.
- Build and administer highly available clusters using streaming replication and technologies such as Patroni, etcd/Consul, repmgr, or equivalent solutions.
- Manage primary/standby nodes, replication slots, WAL, synchronous/asynchronous replication, connection routing, and failover procedures.
- Implement backup and point-in-time recovery using pgBackRest, Barman, native utilities, or approved enterprise tools.
- Monitor replication lag, connections, locks, long-running transactions, WAL growth, checkpoints, storage, table/index bloat, and database health.
- Tune PostgreSQL configuration and queries using pg_stat_statements, EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE, logs, and wait-event analysis.
- Manage VACUUM, autovacuum, ANALYZE, REINDEX, statistics, permissions, authentication, TLS, certificates, and security hardening.
- Plan and test failovers, switchovers, recovery procedures, major-version upgrades, and rollback strategies.

6. Security, Replication and Connectivity
- Establish database security standards covering least-privilege access, role-based permissions, privileged accounts, authentication, auditing, and periodic access reviews.
- Implement encryption at rest and in transit, certificate lifecycle management, vulnerability remediation, and secure credential/secret management.
- Configure and troubleshoot SQL Server transactional replication and other approved data-distribution mechanisms.
- Diagnose replication latency, agent failures, data inconsistencies, transaction-log growth, and subscriber performance.
- Troubleshoot database logins, drivers, connection strings, DNS, listeners, TLS certificates, firewall rules, and connection pooling.
- Maintain an inventory of applications, jobs, integrations, monitoring tools, reporting services, and database clients.

7.

Technical

Leadership and Operational Ownership
- Act as the senior database authority for clients, infrastructure teams, application teams, vendors, and implementation partners.
- Define reference architectures and standards for production, non-production, high-availability, and disaster-recovery environments.




- Review client and partner designs, identify technical risks, and recommend improvements across availability, security, performance, capacity, and recoverability.
- Lead technical workshops, complex production incidents, root-cause analysis, and permanent corrective actions.
- Mentor DBAs and support teams, facilitate knowledge transfer, and ensure operational readiness before production go-live.
- Maintain architecture documents, build guides, configuration baselines, runbooks, health-check reports, recovery procedures, and incident documentation.

Required Qualifications and Experience
- 10+ years of database administration experience, including business-critical production systems.
- 7+ years of strong, hands-on Microsoft SQL Server administration experience.
- Proven experience building SQL Server environments from scratch and implementing enterprise high-availability and disaster-recovery solutions.
- Advanced knowledge of WSFC, Always On Availability Groups, listeners, quorum, multi-node failover, and multi-site architectures.
- Strong SQL Server performance-tuning expertise covering Query Store, execution plans, DMVs, wait statistics, blocking, deadlocks, indexing, statistics, memory, parallelism, tempdb, and transaction logs.
- Hands-on experience with enterprise backup, restore, point-in-time recovery, and DR testing.
- Experience managing large, partitioned, high-DML, and high-transaction-volume databases.
- Practical PostgreSQL administration experience covering cluster setup, replication, backups, recovery, maintenance, monitoring, security, and performance tuning.
- Solid T-SQL skills, working knowledge of PostgreSQL SQL, and scripting/automation capabilities.
- Proven experience working with infrastructure, application, security, DevOps, vendor, and client teams.
- Ability to lead critical production incidents and communicate technical findings to technical and management stakeholders.
- Experience preparing architecture documents, implementation guides, operating procedures, health-check reports, and root-cause analyses.

Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in banking, fintech, payments, or other regulated, high-availability environments.
- Experience supporting geographically distributed production and DR sites.
- SQL Server transactional replication experience.
- Exposure to Azure SQL, SQL Server on Azure VMs, or comparable cloud platforms.
- Familiarity with Redgate, SolarWinds, Dynatrace, SCOM, Grafana/Prometheus, or equivalent monitoring tools.
- Experience automating database builds, configuration validation, maintenance, and health checks.
- Relevant Microsoft, PostgreSQL, cloud, or infrastructure certifications.

Key Success Measures
- Database availability and reliability against agreed service targets.
- Backup success and independently verified restore capability.
- Compliance with RPO/RTO targets and successful DR/failover exercises.
- Reduction in recurring incidents, blocking, deadlocks, uncontrolled tempdb growth, and performance issues.
- Improved critical-query response times and database capacity planning.
- Healthy SQL Server Availability Groups and PostgreSQL replication.
- Timely completion of maintenance, patching, certificate renewals, recovery testing, and capacity reviews.
- Closure of database-readiness risks before production deployment.
- Consistent adoption of database standards, runbooks, and operational documentation.

📌 Senior Database Administrator (Chennai)
🏢 ToCumulus
📍 Chennai