Director, Database Operations

Job title: Director, Database Operations

Reports to: Chief Information Officer

Department: Cloud Platforms

Location: Alpharetta, GA

Grade: 22

About Priority: 

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

As the Director of Database Operations, you will lead the design, reliability, and operational strategy for the company's mission-critical data infrastructure supporting high-volume payment processing and banking systems. Your focus will be on Microsoft SQL Server and Amazon RDS MySQL/Aurora, ensuring scalability, high availability, low latency, and compliance with financial and data security regulations. You will oversee a team responsible for the 24/7 performance of databases that power transaction processing, reporting, fraud prevention, banking, and reconciliation services.

Responsibilities: 

• Lead a team of senior DBAs and database engineers supporting production, staging, and dev/test environments.

• Manage database architecture, administration, and operations for MS SQL Server and Amazon RDS Aurora/MySQL in a high-volume, low-latency transaction environment.

• Partner with Software Engineering, Security, and DevOps, teams to drive the integration of database reliability into CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure.

• Ensure database performance, security, and resilience across all payment systems, including authorization, settlement, chargeback, and risk platforms.

• Drive automation of routine operations (e.g., schema deployments, backups, failovers, capacity scaling).

• Implement disaster recovery and business continuity strategies, including geographically redundant architectures.

• Monitor and tune databases to support high throughput and low-latency transaction workloads, including query optimization and index tuning.

• Ensure compliance with PCI DSS, SOX, and other regulatory standards through strong controls, encryption, and access management.

• Evaluate and implement database tooling, observability platforms, and performance monitoring (e.g., Splunk, Elastic, DataDog, CloudWatch).

• Lead database modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy SQL infrastructure to Aurora or serverless RDS as appropriate.

• Own database vendor relationships, SLAs, and budget forecasting for software, cloud services, and infrastructure.

What Success Looks Like:

Success as a Director of Database Operations involves leading the strategic direction, management, and optimization of the organization's database infrastructure and ensuring the availability, performance, scalability, and security of its data systems. At a senior level, this role is critical for enabling the organization to leverage data effectively while minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency across a range of database environments.

Candidate Requirements:

• Communication: Clear writing, active listening, and the ability to explain technical topics in plain terms.

• Accountabi