Database Administrator

We are looking for a highly motivated, hands-on Principal Database Administrator to own the performance, availability, security, and cost efficiency of our enterprise data platform and databases across Snowflake, Azure, and on-premises SQL Server. This is a senior technical role responsible for administering our Snowflake account end to end, tuning complex workloads, enforcing least-privilege access in a regulated environment, and establishing the automation, security, documentation, and operational standards a growing data organization depends on.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end Snowflake administration: account, warehouse, database, schema, and role architecture.
• Design and maintain a scalable RBAC model with least-privilege enforcement and clean role inheritance.
• Manage database and platform access requests, ensuring appropriate approvals, security controls, and timely provisioning.
• Manage warehouse sizing, auto-suspend/resume, and multi-cluster configuration for workload isolation.
• Monitor and optimize Snowflake credit consumption; implement resource monitors, cost center reporting, and proactive spend alerting.
• Tune query and pipeline performance using Query Profile, clustering keys, micro-partition pruning, materialized views, and Search Optimization.
• Administer Snowpipe, Streams, Tasks, storage integrations, Secure Data Sharing, and cross-region replication.
• Implement column-level security, dynamic data masking, row access policies, and data classification tagging for sensitive data.
• Support administration, access, security, and integration patterns across Databricks and other cloud data platforms.
• Partner closely with Security to identify, remediate, and prevent database and data-platform security findings.
• Administer Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance, including geo-replication, auto-failover groups, and backup/restore strategy.
• Administer on-premises SQL Server: patching, upgrades, Always On Availability Groups, replication, and SQL Agent/SSIS jobs.
• Own and regularly test backup and recovery procedures against defined RTO/RPO targets across all environments.
• Enforce database security and auditing controls sufficient to satisfy internal audit and regulatory examination.
• Automate routine administration using Python, PowerShell, and/or Terraform to eliminate manual toil.
• Manage database objects and permissions through source-controlled, peer-reviewed CI/CD deployment.
• Support secure authentication and credential management, including key-pair authentication and related configuration changes.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and observability for availability, performance, capacity, and cost.
• Participate in on-call rotation; lead incident response and root cause analysis for database-related outages.
• Maintain runbooks, architecture documentation, and operational procedures so the team is not dependent on any single person.
• Serve as the escalation point for complex database issues and mentor engineers on tuning and best practices.
• Support onboarding and integration of new data and AI technologies, ensuring appropriate security, access, and operational controls are in place.
• Partner with data engineering, architects, analytics, application development, security, accounting, and business teams on architecture and operational decisions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in CS, Engineering, or related technical field.
• 3 to 6 years of database administration experience, including 2+ years administering Snowflake in production.
• Demonstrated expertise in Snowflake performance tuning and credit/cost optimization at enterprise scale.
• Experience working across multiple cloud technologies and data platforms, with the ability to quickly learn and adopt new technologies.
• Deep, hands-on SQL Server administration experience across on-premises and Azure (SQL Database and/or Managed Instance).
• Expert-level SQL, including complex query authoring, execution plan analysis, and optimization.
• Proven experience designing and implementing RBAC and data security controls.
• Experience managing database/data-platform access and partnering with security teams to remediate security findings.
• Hands-on high availability and disaster recovery experience with tested, documented recovery procedures.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation using Python, PowerShell, or equivalent.
• Familiarity with CI/CD workflow, source-controlled database change management, and deployment processes.
• Strong incident response skills and comfort operating under production pressure.
• Write clean, well-documented code and procedures that can be easily maintained and extended by the team.
• Provide support for critical production systems as needed.
• Strong problem-solving skills, Exceptional attention to detail, and strong ownership of operational accuracy and quality.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to build trusted partnerships across technical and business teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• SnowPro Advanced: Administrator or SnowPro Advanced: Architect certification.
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate.
• Familiarity in Mortgage Space or another regulated financial services environment.
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform) for database and warehouse provisioning.
• Familiarity with Airflow, or comparable transformation and orchestration tooling.
• Experience supporting analytics and machine learning workloads, not only transactional systems.
• Prior experience leading a database platform migration or major version upgrade.
• Experience with Databricks or other modern cloud data platforms.
• Experience supporting AI/ML platforms, tools, or integrations.
• Experience with cloud security, authentication, key management, and access governance.
• Experience supporting US-based stakeholders across multiple business and technology functions.