Senior Database Administrator

Job Description

Company: GetInsured
Location: Mountain View, CA
Workplace Type: On-site
Employment Type: Full-time

About the Role

Vimo is a national leader in state-based health insurance exchanges and safety-net transformations, powering mission-critical systems that serve millions of people every day. We are looking for a Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator to join our team to design, implement, manage, and optimize our PostgreSQL database environments that power Vimo’s mission-critical SaaS platform.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

• Cluster Deployment and Management: Design, deploy, and maintain PostgreSQL database clusters in production, staging, and development environments.
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery: Ensure high availability and disaster recovery through replication (streaming, logical), failover strategies, and backup/restore procedures across multiple AWS regions.
• Performance Tuning and Optimization: Monitor database performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement query optimization, indexing strategies, and configuration tuning.
• Security and Compliance: Implement and enforce database security best practices including role-based access control, encryption at rest and in transit, and audit logging.
• Automation and Infrastructure as Code: Automate routine DBA tasks using scripting (Bash, Python) and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Jenkins, GitActions).
• Collaboration and Architecture: Collaborate with application development teams on schema design, data modeling, and query performance reviews.
• Cloud and Extension Management: Manage PostgreSQL in cloud environments (AWS RDS, Aurora PostgreSQL) and evaluate/implement PostgreSQL extensions (e.g., PostGIS, pg_partman, Citus, pgvector).
• Incident Response: Participate in on-call rotation for production database incidents and lead root cause analysis for database-related outages.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience as a PostgreSQL DBA in production environments.
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL internals including MVCC, WAL, vacuum, replication, and connection pooling (PgBouncer, Pgpool-II).
• Strong experience with performance tuning, query optimization, and EXPLAIN/ANALYZE interpretation.
• Proficiency in backup and recovery tools (pg_dump, pg_basebackup, pgBackRest, Barman).
• Experience with high-availability architectures (Patroni, repmgr).
• Solid Linux/Unix administration skills and scripting proficiency in Bash or Python.
• Experience with cloud-hosted PostgreSQL (AWS RDS/Aurora, GCP Cloud SQL, or Azure Database).
• Strong understanding of database security, compliance, and access management.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

• Experience supporting databases in regulated industries (healthcare, government, or financial services).
• Familiarity with HIPAA, FedRAMP, or SOC 2 compliance requirements.
• Experience with database CI/CD pipelines and schema migration tools (Flyway, Liquibase, Alembic).
• Knowledge of containerized deployments (Docker, Kubernetes) for PostgreSQL.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, pganalyze, pg_stat_statements).
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Ansible.
• PostgreSQL certification or contributions to the PostgreSQL community.
• Familiarity with other database systems (MySQL, MongoDB, Redis).

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

• Health, dental, life, disability, and vision insurance
• Health care spending or reimbursement accounts (FSA)
• Retirement benefits (401k)
• Paid time off
• Education assistance or tuition reimbursement
• Employee discounts for gym memberships and commuting/travel assistance

This role may involve access to sensitive or regulated information. The candidate is expected to handle all data in accordance with company security, privacy, and data protection policies.