[Remote] Database Administrator III

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. AccuWeather is hiring a Database Administrator III to maintain the reliability, security, performance, and availability of its production SQL Server and PostgreSQL environments. The role leads database operations and cloud migrations while partnering with architecture and engineering teams to improve standards and operational practices.

Responsibilities

• Administer SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases end to end — performance tuning, query optimization, indexing strategy, and execution plan analysis
• Design, implement, and regularly test backup, replication, and disaster recovery procedures for databases, ensuring high availability across production environments
• Manage database security — roles, permissions, access control, and auditing
• Monitor and plan for database capacity — storage growth, connection pooling, and resource allocation
• Manage database version upgrades, patching cycles, and configuration tuning
• Perform routine database maintenance — index/statistics upkeep, vacuuming, storage optimization, and space reclamation — to sustain performance over time
• Proactively monitor database health and performance, identifying and resolving issues before they affect production
• Manage cloud cost optimization and capacity planning, including license reporting and true-ups, resource forecasting, and optimization of Azure compute spend through Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and related strategies
• Partner with the Data Architect and engineering teams to establish database standards, improve operational practices, and proactively address reliability and performance concerns
• Plan and execute database migrations to the cloud, optimizing configurations for target environments, and ensuring performance, security, resiliency, and recoverability throughout the transition
• Build strong working relationships with engineering teams, communicating database constraints and recommendations in terms they can act on
• Share database expertise and best practices with less experienced administrators and engineering team members
• Performs other duties as assigned

Skills

• BA/BS in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, with 5+ years of experience in data operations or database administration, or MS with 3+ years of experience
• Demonstrated experience as a database administrator with SQL Server and/or PostgreSQL, including performance tuning, backup and recovery, high availability, security and access management, and capacity planning
• Advanced SQL/T-SQL proficiency, with working knowledge of at least one scripting language (Python or PowerShell) for database automation
• Ability to design and implement monitoring solutions for database health, performance, and capacity
• Experience with, or strong working knowledge of, migrating databases to cloud-based environments (e.g., Microsoft Azure)
• Awareness of the monetary costs associated with operational work
• Demonstrated experience mentoring or coaching less experienced engineers
• Strong systems thinking; understands how failure in one system cascades to others across a portfolio
• Sound judgment balancing database performance, availability, security, and cost trade-offs
• Excellent written communication; operational health reports are usable by data consumers and leadership without interpretation
• Sound judgment distinguishing proximate causes from systemic causes when writing postmortems
• Mentoring and coaching skills; able to develop the operational judgment of less experienced engineers
• Ability to lead complex incident response and drive systemic reliability improvement independently
• Experience with advanced replication topologies (e.g., multi-region, active-active) for SQL Server and/or PostgreSQL
• Experience administrating, performance monitoring, troubleshooting, and performing backup/recovery of database systems (e.g. SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Azure SQL or similar systems)
• Familiarity with, or willingness to grow into, modern cloud data platforms, including Databricks and Snowflake
• Experience with CI/CD automation
• Experience with Azure Data Factory (ADF) for building, orchestrating, and maintaining reliable data ingestion and loading pipelines
• Experience participating in structured post-mortems and root cause analysis for significant incidents
• Familiarity with data governance practices (quality checks, lineage documentation, access control)

Benefits

• Work from AccuWeather’s global headquarters in State College, PA, USA, or remotely.

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