Senior Database Administrator

VitalSource®, is hiring a Senior MySQL Database Administrator to contribute to our Engineering team located in Raleigh NC, Franklin TN, Chicago IL, or Boston MA (preferred locations). Applicants outside of these preferred locations will still be considered. There is a 10% travel requirement for this role for in-person team meetings.

Join VitalSource as a Senior MySQL Database Administrator and help shape the backbone of our data infrastructure. We're looking for a skilled and strategic thinker to take ownership of the performance, integrity, and security of our expanding database environment. In this pivotal role, you'll optimize critical systems, collaborate with application teams to drive efficient data usage, and implement robust strategies for scalability, backup, and recovery. You'll also contribute to high-level architectural planning, ensuring our data solutions align with and support the company's long-term goals.

Key Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with developers to design efficient schemas; partner with application teams to help design solutions and choose appropriate database technologies.
• Assist application teams with query optimization and best practices for data manipulation.  
• Collaborate with teams on data hygiene practices to maintain data quality and accuracy.
• Monitor and fine-tune database performance; optimize queries, indexes, and caching mechanisms; implement best practices for scalability.  
• Manage user access and permissions; implement encryption, authentication, and authorization; regularly audit security configurations; assist in planning and executing PII purging.  
• Design and maintain backup strategies; test and validate disaster recovery procedures; ensure data consistency and integrity; develop and implement partitioning and sharding strategies for large tables to enhance restore times and reduce deadlocks.  
• Review and suggest appropriate database architectures; plan and execute database upgrades.  
• Set up monitoring tools (e.g. New Relic, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics) for proactive issue detection; investigate and resolve database-related incidents; provide timely support during critical incidents; maintain high uptime through careful planning and coordination.  
• This role will require participation as on-call escalation for critical database issues.
• Other duties may be assigned by supervisor or leadership as business needs arise.

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of database administration experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, or equivalent experience.
• Prior experience in relational DBMS, NoSQL DBMS, cloud-based relational databases required.
• Certifications such as AWS Certified Database- Specialty or Google Cloud Professional Database Engineer are a plus.

Technical Skills:

• 7+ years of experience with relational database management systems (RDBMS) MySQL
• 5+ years of experience with cloud-based relational databases such as Cloud SQL, Amazon RDS, or Aurora.
• 2+ years of experience with data warehousing solutions such BigQuery.
• 5+ years of experience with NoSQL databases, including document-oriented (e.g., MongoDB), key-value stores (e.g., Redis, KeyDB), and search platforms (e.g., ElasticSearch).
• 1+ years of experience with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j)
• Familiarity with infrastructure as code tools like Terraform and automation/orchestration tools.  
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and containerized databased deployments is a plus.
• Proficiency in scripting languages such as Python, Bash, or SQL for automation tasks is preferred.
• Expertise with database performance tuning, query optimization, and scalability implementation.  
• Exp