Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. AccuWeather is seeking an experienced Database Administrator to support its critical database environments for a global audience. The role owns database reliability, security, performance, availability, operational standards, and cloud migration initiatives across SQL Server and PostgreSQL systems.
Responsibilities
- Administer SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases end to end — performance tuning, query optimization, indexing strategy, and execution plan analysis
- Design, implement, and regularly test backup, replication, and disaster recovery procedures for databases, ensuring high availability across production environments
- Manage database security — roles, permissions, access control, and auditing
- Monitor and plan for database capacity — storage growth, connection pooling, and resource allocation
- Manage database version upgrades, patching cycles, and configuration tuning
- Perform routine database maintenance — index/statistics upkeep, vacuuming, storage optimization, and space reclamation — to sustain performance over time
- Proactively monitor database health and performance, identifying and resolving issues before they affect production
- Manage cloud cost optimization and capacity planning, including license reporting and true-ups, resource forecasting, and optimization of Azure compute spend through Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and related strategies
- Partner with the Data Architect and engineering teams to establish database standards, improve operational practices, and proactively address reliability and performance concerns
- Plan and execute database migrations to the cloud, optimizing configurations for target environments, and ensuring performance, security, resiliency, and recoverability throughout the transition
- Build strong working relationships with engineering teams, communicating database constraints and recommendations in terms they can act on
- Share database expertise and best practices with less experienced administrators and engineering team members
- Performs other duties as assigned
Skills
- BA/BS in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, with 5+ years of experience in data operations or database administration, or MS with 3+ years of experience
- Demonstrated experience as a database administrator with SQL Server and/or PostgreSQL, including performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, security and access management, and capacity planning
- Advanced SQL/T-SQL proficiency, with working knowledge of at least one scripting language (Python or PowerShell) for database automation
- Ability to design and implement monitoring solutions for database health, performance, and capacity
- Experience with, or strong working knowledge of, migrating databases to cloud-based environments (e.g., Microsoft Azure)
- Awareness of the monetary costs associated with operational work
- Demonstrated experience mentoring or coaching less experienced engineers
- Strong systems thinking; understands how failure in one system cascades to others across a portfolio
- Sound judgment balancing database performance, availability, security, and cost trade-offs
- Excellent written communication; operational health reports are usable by data consumers and leadership without interpretation
- Sound judgment distinguishing proximate causes from systemic causes when writing postmortems
- Mentoring and coaching skills; able to develop the operational judgment of less experienced engineers
- Ability to lead complex incident response and drive systemic reliability improvement independently
- Experience with advanced replication topologies (e.g., multi-region, active-active) for SQL Server and/or PostgreSQL
- Experience administrating, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and performing backup/recovery of database systems (e.g. SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Azure SQL or similar systems)
- Familiarity with, or willingness to grow into, modern cloud data platforms, including Databricks and Snowflake
- Experience with CI/CD automation
- Experience with Azure Data Factory (ADF) for building, orchestrating, and maintaining reliable data ingestion and loading pipelines
- Experience participating in structured post-mortems and root cause analysis for significant incidents
- Familiarity with data governance practices (quality checks, lineage documentation, access control)
Benefits
- Remote work option or work from AccuWeather's global headquarters in State College, PA, USA
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