Vice President, Senior Database Administrator

The Vice President, Senior Database Administrator is responsible for the strategic leadership, architecture, and operational management of all enterprise database platforms across on-premises and cloud environments. This role ensures the reliability, security, performance, and scalability of mission-critical data systems while aligning database services with enterprise technology strategy.

This position oversees complex multi-platform ecosystems including relational, cloud-native, and analytical databases, and will lead both on-shore and off-shore resources in delivering highly available and secure database services.

This position requires strong technical depth combined with leadership capability, governance experience, and cross-functional collaboration across engineering, security, infrastructure, and application teams.

Responsibilities

Enterprise Database Strategy & Architecture

• Define and drive enterprise database architecture standards, roadmaps, and modernization initiatives.

• Provide technical leadership across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

• Evaluate emerging database technologies and recommend adoption strategies aligned with business objectives.

• Establish best practices for scalability, resiliency, and performance optimization.

Platform Administration & Engineering

• Provide leadership and hands-on expertise across enterprise database platforms including but not limited to:

• Oracle (including Autonomous Database), PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Sybase, IBM DB2, Snowflake, MongoDB, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and other enterprise database technologies as required.

• Responsibilities include high availability and disaster recovery architecture, performance tuning and capacity planning, patch and lifecycle management, automation and infrastructure-as-code practices, and optimization across OLTP and analytics workloads.

Cloud & Hybrid Database Operations

• Lead database deployments across cloud platforms including AWS RDS, OCI Autonomous Database, and hybrid architectures.

• Develop governance frameworks for cloud database provisioning, cost optimization, and operational controls.

• Partner with Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams to implement automation, CI/CD integration, and platform observability with a heavy emphasis on Infrastructure as Code.

Security, Risk & Compliance

• Ensure database platforms meet enterprise security, audit, and regulatory requirements.

• Collaborate with cybersecurity teams on vulnerability management, encryption standards, and access governance.

• Implement secure configuration baselines and data protection strategies.

Team Leadership & Resource Management

• Lead and mentor both on-shore and off-shore database administration teams.

• Manage vendor relationships and third-party service providers.

• Establish operational procedures, service level objectives, and performance metrics.

• Provide escalation leadership during critical incidents and production events.

Operational Excellence

• Drive automation and standardization of database operations.

• Develop monitoring, alerting, and proactive maintenance practices.

• Improve reliability through continuous improvement initiatives.

• Support enterprise programs including cloud migrations, platform upgrades, and data center transitions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related field (or equivalent experience).

• 10+ years of progressive database administration experience in enterprise environments.

• Demonstrated expertise across multiple database platforms (Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Snowflake, MongoDB, DB2, Redshift, etc.).

• Proven experience managing hybrid cloud and on-prem database deployments.

• Experience leading distributed technical teams including offshore resources.

• Strategic thinker with strong execution capability

• Ability to balance governance with engineering innovation

• Strong incident leadership and crisis management experience

• Strong understanding of high availability, disaster recovery, and enterprise security practices.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Autonomous Database, AWS RDS, or large-scale cloud-native data platforms.

• Background in IaC and CI/CD automation frameworks (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, or similar).

• Exp