Job description

Flairstech is looking for a Senior Database Administrator to join our engineering team, reporting to the CTO. You'll own how we design, operate, and govern data at the database layer — schema and migration standards, performance tuning and capacity planning, backup and disaster-recovery discipline, and access security — across our production MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, partnering closely with engineering and DevSecOps rather than working in isolation.

This role also plays an integral part in a major new initiative: a procurement and catalog platform built around a canonical product/supplier-offering data model, master data governance, and an event-driven architecture, much of it extending our existing PostgreSQL environment (including the pgvector extension for semantic search and relationship modeling for a knowledge graph). You'll help design and scale the data model underneath that platform alongside a small, senior engineering team, and set the standards the rest of the organization builds on as our database needs continue to grow.

What You'll Do

Database Design & Standards

• Establish schema design standards, migration conventions, and a review process for database changes across MySQL and PostgreSQL services — work currently done ad hoc by the engineers building each feature.
• Review and advise on schema changes proposed by application engineers (procure, core-api, job-workers), with a focus on indexing strategy, normalization tradeoffs, and query performance.
• Document data modeling conventions and migration practices so the standards outlive any one person's institutional knowledge.

Performance, Reliability & Operations

• Own query performance tuning and capacity planning across production databases, monitoring for slow queries, lock contention, and connection saturation before they become incidents.
• Partner with DevSecOps to define and test backup, restore, and disaster-recovery procedures — verifying, not just configuring, Multi-AZ failover and the existing 30-day backup retention.
• Build database health monitoring and alerting so degradation is caught proactively rather than discovered during troubleshooting.

Lifecycle, Governance & Security

• Own database version lifecycle management: planning and executing engine upgrades ahead of end-of-support, and decommissioning legacy or duplicate instances once migrations are confirmed complete.
• Partner with DevSecOps to bring database versions under Infrastructure-as-Code management and to close network exposure and access-control findings as they're identified.
• Manage database access control and credential hygiene — least-privilege roles, credential rotation, and audit logging of privileged access.

Data Platform & Analytics

• Provide database and data-modeling expertise for our Snowflake/dbt analytics environment, helping extend the same version and access governance there.
• Support engineering and product teams with data modeling guidance for features with analytics or reporting requirements.
• Act as the team's go-to resource for database questions, mentoring engineers on schema design and query performance as part of code review.

Catalog & Search Platform Initiative

• Serve as the database lead for a new procurement and catalog platform — a canonical product/supplier-offering data model with master data governance, versioned catalog history, and multi-tenant customer-specific views — extending our existing PostgreSQL environment rather than standing up new database infrastructure.
• Design and tune the PostgreSQL schema underneath the catalog domain, including catalog versioning and audit history, an ID crosswalk to legacy transactional records, and relationship tables supporting a knowledge graph.
• Support the platform's pgvector-based semantic search and its event-driven architecture — schema-versioned events, idempotent processing, and the replay strategy that lets catalog and search state be rebuilt from history.
• Advise on performance and isolation for multi-tenant customer catalogs, including row-level tenant isolation and materialized views for high-volume accounts.
• Extend our Snowflake/dbt warehouse to support the platform's analytics and data-quality KPIs, such as match confidence, pricing/inventory freshness, and catalog completeness.

What We're Looking For

Required

• 7+ years of hands-on database administration experience in production environments, including at least one relational engine at meaningful scale (MySQL and/or PostgreSQL).
• Demonstrated ownership of query performance tuning, indexing strategy, and query optimization in a live production system.
• Experience planning and executing major database engine upgrades and migrations (e.g., blue/green or similar cutover strategies) with minimal downtime.
• Strong understanding of backup/restore, high-availability, and disaster-recovery patterns (Multi-AZ, automated backups, failover testing) in a cloud environment (AWS RDS or equivalent).
• Comfort working with event-driven, eventually-consistent data architectures — schema versioning, idempotent processing, and rebuild-from-event-history patterns — not just traditional transactional systems.
• Experience establishing schema design standards, review processes, or data modeling conventions for an engineering team without a dedicated DBA function.
• Comfort partnering with application engineers and DevSecOps rather than working in isolation — this role is as much about building a practice as running one.
• Practical database security fundamentals: least-privilege access, credential rotation, and encryption at rest and in transit.
• Proficiency in SQL and at least one scripting/automation language (Python or Bash) for tooling and monitoring.

Nice to Have

• Experience with cloud data warehouses and transformation tooling (e.g., Snowflake, dbt).
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) for managing database resources.
• Experience with PostgreSQL extensions such as pgvector, or modeling graph-like relationships in a relational database.
• Experience supporting master data management, entity resolution, or record-matching systems.
• Experience operating in a SOC 2 or similarly compliance-driven environment.

Experience