Location: Orange County, NC
Work Site: Hybrid 3 days a week (TU/ TH are meeting/ collaboration onsite, offsite days can be M-W or W-F)

Employment Type: Contract to Hire (ideal 3 months)

Responsibilities

• Administer, monitor, and maintain production database systems (SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or other platforms).
• Perform proactive system health checks, performance tuning, and optimization of queries, indexes, and database configurations.
• Implement and manage high availability, clustering, replication, and failover solutions.
• Set up, validate, and execute backup/restore processes, ensuring disaster recovery readiness.
• Monitor database growth, resource utilization, and capacity planning.
• Troubleshoot and resolve performance bottlenecks, locking/blocking issues, and system errors in production environments.
• Apply patches, upgrades, and security updates with minimal service interruption.
• Collaborate closely with application developers, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to ensure database stability in deployments.
• Maintain strict security and compliance standards for data access, auditing, and storage.
• Create and maintain documentation, including runbooks and operational procedures.
• Research and recommend improvements in database technology, tools, and practices.
• Participate in on-call rotation and respond to production incidents as required.
• Other related duties as assigned by leadership.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field preferred, or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years of production DBA experience in high-availability environments.
• Supporting mission-critical systems.
• Expertise in at least one major RDBMS (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL) with strong knowledge of internals (MS SQL preferred).
• Regular performance tuning, query optimization, and index management, based on best practices and logs/data.
• High Availability and disaster recovery
• Backup/restore tools, monitoring solutions, and automation scripts.
• Implementing database security and compliance best practices.
• Azure
• Administrative-level knowledge of MS Windows Server environments, including virtual, physical, and cloud-based.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to work under pressure.
• Excellent communication and documentation skills.
• Demonstrated understanding of ITIL (adherence to change management, releases, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications

• Ecommerce environment.
• Regulated environments (PCI, HIPAA, ISO27000, etc.)
• ORM frameworks and application integration (e.g., Entity Framework, Hibernate, Active Record).
• NoSQL databases and hybrid data architecture.

Soft Skills

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills with the ability to apply knowledge.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities.
• Detail-oriented with a proactive approach to performance and scalability challenges.
• Self-starter.
• Work well within and across teams in regular as well as triage-based instances, both in person as well as virtually (preferred MS Teams).
• Willingness to work on a flexible schedule, as needed and scheduled (such as during defined maintenance windows).

Details