Database Administrator

About the role:

The Technology Team at GLG builds the platform that matches companies around the world with the experts who can help them make the right call on their most important decisions. GLG is building a next generation platform to transform our industry, and we’re looking for people to help define and build our data infrastructure. Joining GLG’s Database Reliability Engineering (DRE) team, you’ll collaborate with other database administrators, database engineers, systems architects, software engineers, product managers, and users to set and achieve goals that help GLG continue to define the future of expertise.

Database Reliability Engineering at GLG is a union of traditional database administration, database engineering, system operations, and software engineering. We focus on the interactions between applications and data stores. We build a deep understanding of applications, data pipelines, data stores, and develop code and configuration to optimize the interactions between those components for scalability, performance, and resilience. We work closely with application teams on the construction of data-heavy systems, provide expert guidance on the design, security, and implementation of data storage and the software systems that use them. We are polyglot database engineers that thrive in and understand multiple scripting languages and data platforms.

Key Responsibilities:

• Manage, monitor, and scale our cloud-based database fleet, with an emphasis on AWS RDS and Aurora for PostgreSQL.
• Tune SQL queries to increase performance and decrease overall system impact across PostgreSQL and SQL Server environments.
• Monitor database instances for performance problems and alleviate bottlenecks.
• Build automation and tooling to reduce operational toil and eliminate repetitive tasks.
• Design and refactor data structures to meet performance and scalability goals.
• Review schema change proposals from development teams, providing expert guidance on best practices for our target database platforms.
• Administer database roles and users.
• Manage and maintain robust backup and recovery strategies, leveraging both native AWS tools and custom solutions.
• Conduct capacity planning and make data-driven recommendations for scaling our database infrastructure.
• Coach, educate, and lead other engineers across the technology organization on how to best interact with data through code reviews, pairing and design reviews.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience managing and administering production PostgreSQL
• 3+ years of experience managing and administering production SQL Server
• Expertise with AWS-managed database services, including RDS and Aurora for PostgreSQL.
• Working knowledge of core AWS services (e.g., EC2, S3, IAM, CloudWatch).
• Strong PostgreSQL performance tuning abilities. You must understand the query planner and be able to improve query performance without relying solely on automated advisors.
• Ability to read and interpret PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE plans to identify performance bottlenecks.
• Proven Expertise in SQL, specifically PostgreSQL and T-SQL
• Strong proficiency in scripting languages such as PowerShell, Python or Bash for automation.
• Experience with PostgreSQL high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies, such as streaming replication.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to educate other team members on performance-minded schema and query design.
• Strong understanding and awareness of data security and secure data handling principles.
• Working knowledge of database design fundamentals and best practices.
• Proficiency with database systems other than PostgreSQL and SQL Server is a major plus.
• Fundamental understanding of Git for version control is a plus.