Senior Database Administrator

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Senior Database Administrator for a full-time position (40 hours per week) in Europe. Our client is a technology-driven financial services company that provides digital payment solutions for businesses. Its platform enables companies to securely accept and manage payments through multiple channels, supporting businesses of different sizes in streamlining their payment operations and expanding their digital capabilities.

As a Senior Database Administrator you will be responsible for the design, implementation, performance, and reliability of our database systems. You will work closely with product engineering, DevOps, and Data teams to ensure our databases are highly available, performant, and secure. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in relational and non-relational database technologies, and an understanding of modern infrastructure practices including Infrastructure as Code, observability, and automation.

The selected engineer will report directly to the Head of Infrastructure. You will work closely with other members of the department including members of the Devops, Observability, Security teams and quite heavily with other product engineering teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a Database Administrator or Database Reliability Engineer.

• Deep expertise with relational databases such as MySQL, including replication, partitioning, and high-availability configurations.

• Solid experience with NoSQL databases such as Redis and MongoDB.

• Experience operating databases on AWS (RDS, Aurora) or similar cloud-managed database services.

• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform for provisioning and managing database infrastructure.

• Proficiency in writing scripts and developing automation using SQL, Python, Bash, or similar languages.

• Experience with database observability using monitoring and alerting tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch.

• Experience using AI-assisted tooling (e.g., AI-powered query advisors, LLM-based copilots, or automated performance analyzers) to improve database operations and troubleshooting workflows.

• Strong understanding of database backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies.

• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues in high-throughput, low-latency transactional systems.

• Ability to clearly articulate, implement, and document design decisions around data modeling and database architecture.

Will be a plus

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field would be beneficial but is not required.

• Experience in the fintech industry or with payment processing systems, particularly with PCI DSS compliance as it relates to data storage and handling.

• Experience with database change management and CI/CD for schema migrations (e.g., Flyway, Liquibase, gh-ost).

• Familiarity with data warehousing, analytical databases, or streaming platforms such as Kafka.

Responsibilities

• Own database architecture and strategy end to end, often collaborating across engineering teams.

• Design and implement database solutions that are scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant to support mission-critical payment workloads.

• Plan and execute database migrations, upgrades, and schema changes with minimal downtime.

• Build and maintain automated database provisioning, backup, and recovery pipelines using Infrastructure as Code tools.

• Proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks through query optimization, indexing strategies, and capacity planning.

• Leverage AI-driven tools and techniques for anomaly detection, predictive performance tuning, and automated root cause analysis of database issues.

• Implement and manage database monitoring and alerting using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana to ensure early detection of issues.

• Design and enforce database security policies, including encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and audit logging.

• Lead incident response for database-related outages, conduct root cause analysis, and drive postmortems to prevent recurrence.

• Develop and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity plans for all database systems.

• Tackle ambiguous, high-risk data challenges proactively and introduce new ideas to simplify complex data architectures.