Senior Database Engineer

Department
 

F&A ITS - Database Systems

About the Department
 

IT Services collaborates with campus partners to support the mission of the University of Chicago through the consistent delivery of high-quality solutions and services.

• We provide secure, stable, and reliable infrastructure and applications to support the mission of the University.
• We support and enable faculty research and teaching with the effective use of technology.
• We simplify the technology experience for faculty, students, alumni, and staff, and we ensure technology is mobile-friendly and accessible.
• We identify, manage, and mitigate the technology risks of the University.

Job Summary
 

In this role, the Senior Database Engineer will be a hands-on professional who oversees and participates in the daily activities of the Database team as well as helps lead the team towards a data center agnostic environment using automation and Cloud based technologies. Must be able to work well both independently and as part of a team. The position will interact with customers reviewing business requirements, participate in project planning, and perform architectural design with the ability to execute on assigned tasks. In addition, this role will interface with our business application teams to provide ongoing administrative support including the installation and maintenance of our Enterprise Database Systems. The Senior Database Engineer is expected to work and contribute with other IT Services departments to provide seamless integration between all teams. This position is expected to evolve and change over time.

The University of Chicago is a vibrant community of people dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in education and research. One of the largest employers in the metropolitan area, the University employs 10,000 diverse and talented individuals who come to work here from all over the world. The University's location in the heart of an urban environment provides many cultural offerings as well as opportunities to engage with the local community.

Responsibilities

• Expertise and understanding to perform all essential database administrative skills.  Includes all tasks related to the installation, configuration, patching, upgrade, and tuning of both Oracle and MySQL databases on Linux-based systems.
• Leads the team in the development of code-based procedures and processes to automated tasks using the Ansible automation framework.
• Expertise in tuning and monitoring Oracle database systems to troubleshoot and eliminate bottlenecks. Must be able to dig into issues and use tracing/diagnostic tools to help resolve problems.
• Extensive experience with backup and recovery procedures that would allow the candidate to independently manage all disaster recovery scenarios. This includes knowledge of Oracle RMAN and tape library software.
• Works independently with the ability to handle all database-related tasks in the AWS cloud environment.  Includes the ability to manage and support MySQL RDS instances on Amazon cloud platform.
• Expertise with Ansible to support automation across the enterprise environment.
• Provides support for problems escalated from the IT Services Service Desk and other team members. Performs knowledge-sharing training for Tier 1 and Tier 2 support personnel including team members, acting as a resource for colleagues with lesser experience.
• Solves complex problems and applies appropriate fixes and patches as necessary.
• Monitors and maintains system integrity assuring maximum availability using Oracle Cloud Control and/or other monitoring tools. This includes monitoring backups, maintaining appropriate access rights, and securing enterprise systems in accordance with IT Services standards.
• Conducts and participates in meetings with presentation of professional grade deliverables such as technical architecture documents, technical drawings, and proposals.
• Escalation point for database related issues.
• Maintains awareness of current and emerging tools, forces, trends, techniques, and products in the industry and how they could support research, teaching, and learning.
• Develops and maintains procedures for database server administration including lifecycle management, data protection, patch management and security vulnerability remediation.
• Creates technical reference architectures and maintains team knowledge base documentation.
• Uses best practices and database knowledge to determine the impact of making database changes on other systems and the staff cost for making such changes. Solves complex database problems and modifies database programs to increase processing performance.
• Designs and monitors database administration procedures including backup and recovery. Tests and corrects errors a