About the Role

We need a person who loves every aspect of how data contributes to an application because it is crucial to ours. This person will be responsible for improving our data model, ensuring that database access is efficient, directing data backup/restore, failover, and disaster recovery.  The DBA will champion the data portion of our architecture and keep data flowing effectively between systems.  We are a startup which means everyone wears many hats.  We need classic DBA capabilities as well as more strategic thinking.

The DBA will be critical to the following teams:

1) Our Operations team that, among many other things, ensures every student has an individualized schedule based on a number of factors every day

2) Our Engineering team that needs to build, evolve, and maintain the product set and

3) Our Quality Assurance team that needs to be able to monitor data states in production and simulate potential data states in test.

About the Team

The Production Engineering team is a new department dedicated to maintaining and ensuring the functionality of Teach To One: Math across all product areas. The work of the team includes the management of our infrastructure and databases, the creation of new tools to automate and test our code and on-call bug fixing and firefighting. We partner with our software development team to maintain existing products and take over new products once they are operationalized.

Our Stack

Our technical stack currently includes components that create content, partner with third party vendors, process data, and deliver information to schools across the US. Our infrastructure exists primarily in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. We utilize Microsoft SQL Server 2016 SP1 to drive the majority of our applications, but also use PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Azure SQL as well. We have .NET, .NET Core, Node.js, and Python code bases that each serve particular purposes and work across all of our database products.

What You Would Do

Junior:

Senior:

Application Information

Equal Opportunity

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, marital status, affectional or sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, nationality or sex.

Work Authorization

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification document form upon hire.

Desired Skills and Experience

  • Provide on-call support for issues that affect schools and our ability to deliver material to them
  • Ensure the smooth operations of all database systems
  • Manage databases in the full SDLC for new and existing products
  • Optimize the overnight batch processing of daily student data
  • Provide on-call support for issues that affect schools and our ability to deliver material to them
  • Oversee and enhance ETL across various database products
  • Help refactor data models as the needs and direction of the program change
  • Reinforce reliable, standardized processes for database administration (backup, disaster recovery, index optimization, security audits, etc).
  • Enhance security protocols to keep data safe
  • All of the above in addition to:
  • Serve as a database subject matter expert and partner with developers on performance tuning and best practices
  • Develop an ETL process to feed into a new data warehouse to support operational reporting and data science endeavors
  • Aid the Data Solutions team in data discovery, identification, and warehousing
  • Assess new cloud-based data opportunities as they evolve and become available
  • Help implement a new, pervasive monitoring and alerting framework across the company’s evolving infrastructure
  • Investigate cross-cloud opportunities for redundancy and distributed performance
  • Strong desire to work in a highly collaborative, dynamic, fast-paced, startup environment
  • Adaptable to changing environment and circumstances
  • Familiarity and comfort within an agile project/dev structure
  • Interest in working closely with both technical and non-technical team members
  • Comfort working with on-site and remote resources
  • Ability to internalize business goals and use that information to establish data solutions that scale well and are robust
  • Desire to learn enough about infrastructure management to cover for the Systems Administrator when not available
  • Must have: Experience working with production environments using SQL Server
  • Knowledge of indexes, index management, server configuration tuning, patching. How statistics work, how indexes are stored. How to configure AlwaysOn availability groups.
  • Experience in troubleshooting and resolving database integrity issues, performance issues, blocking and deadlocking issues, replication issues, connectivity issues, security issues etc.
  • Experience in Performance Tuning, Query Optimization, using Performance Monitor, DMVs, and reading execution plans
  • Ability to identify and troubleshoot SQL Server related CPU, memory, I/O, disk space and other resource contention.
  • Knowledge of SQL Server tools (SolarWinds DPA, Extended Events, RedGate Plan Explorer)
  • T-SQL development experience – ability to write and troubleshoot, and design (stored procs, functions, tables, views, triggers, indexes, constraints)
  • Other than SQL Server
  • Comfort with alternative data platforms including PostgreSQL, Azure SQL, CosmosDB, MongoDB, Azure SQL Data Warehouse
  • Understanding of ORMs and object mappers
  • Experience with git
  • Experience with Atlassian products (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket)
  • Comfort with Windows and one or more popular Linux distributions
  • Knowledge of PowerShell and/or bash
  • Architectural understanding of how the data layer can best factor into an overall product stack
  • Experience with data reconciliation and migration between data environments (e.g. dev, test, staging, prod, etc)
  • All of the above in addition to:
  • Must have: demonstrated experience managing production grade, cloud hosted (strong preference for Azure), SQL Server database solutions servicing thousands of concurrent users that are geographically disparate
  • Knowledge of or desire to learn CI/CD for database systems
  • Other than SQL Server
  • Experience with alternative data platforms including PostgreSQL, Azure SQL, CosmosDB, MongoDB, Azure SQL Data Warehouse
  • Ability to debug and review C# code using ORMs and object mappers (NHibernate, Entity Framework, Dapper)
  • Experience with git
  • Experience with Atlassian products (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket)
  • Able to work in and maintain Linux VMs for database software, including bash scripting
  • Ability to create solutions in PowerShell for database management and Windows maintenance
  • Experience implementing, designing, or maintaining n-tier applications that utilize a shared data layer in the cloud.
  • Experience with dynamic data generation for testing, data obfuscation, and security best practices for PII data.