Director, Database Administration

What you’ll do

In a few words…

The Director of Database Administration is the North Star of the Database Administration team within our IT Infrastructure. Like the North Star, your job is to guide, lead, show, and direct the database team. This role is a hands-on resource responsible to manage a wide range of database initiatives. The Director drives database planning, implementation, and support across Abarca. This role will collaborate across Infrastructure, Development, Security, Analytics, and other teams to deliver innovative, efficient, quality, and secure database solutions. (The North Star, the compass, the map… you get the drift… without you we’d all be lost!)

In this leadership role, the Director of Database Administration is accountable and focused on providing a portfolio of data products across the entire data lifecycle, including database, cloud data storage and retrieval, data archiving, data governance, data policy, secure data logistics, and data transfer. They will also combine a deep knowledge of their business area with technical fluency to identify the right solution for the right business problem. By collaborating with other team members and internal stakeholders they develop a robust, effective roadmap for their product area. They are hands-on in planning implementations and work closely with the BI team to provide technical guidance, mentorship, and best practices for unlocking the full business value of rich data.

The fundamentals for the job…

• You will be the compass that points north, providing strategic leadership, management, and direction to the database platform teams, ensuring optimal DB platform operations across people, processes, and technologies;
• Derive and enforce Database Platform policies, standards, processes, and procedures to ensure compliance
• Establish and monitor key performance indicators and service level objectives for continually improving the performance and availability of database platforms
• Oversee the monitoring, maintenance, upgrade, and administration of all database platforms to achieve great customer experience, system availability, performance, and security objectives
• Review performance and capacity of database platforms to manage the optimization of operating costs, improve operational efficiency, increase reliability and performance, productivity levels, and upgrade requirements (Your quest for better continues…)
• Responsible for database disaster recovery and data replication, including planning, documentation, implementation and failover testing (Miracles are occasionally expected.)
• Manages 3rd party vendors and service providers, performance, SLA’s, incidents, issue/problem resolution, and escalation
• Provides leadership and direction to ensure team excellence results for all areas of Distributed Database Services. This includes managing database utilities, monitoring the relationships between the database users and applications, and managing processes around archiving, purging, retention and recovery
• Implements strategies to attract, retain, motivate and develop talent in their organization
• Directs teams, ensuring they are working together effectively. Partners with and integrates across other areas of the company, resolving conflicts, and managing competing priorities
• Manages and resolves internal and external client issues, including competing demands, sensitive situations, and conflicts within their organization and/or with other teams (Your collaborative and interpersonal skills are OP.)
• Builds and maintains key partnerships and alignment across both application development and infrastructure teams in order to ensure we provide the most optimal DB performance
• Provide training and development opportunities, including stretch assignments, for team members and give honest feedback to aid in the development of talent
• Direct and provide leadership to continually improve the capability and results for your assigned team (Again… a compass.)
• Direct technology assets and team resources to ensure project, operational performance, reliability, and availability objectives are met
• Develop and implement appropriate data operations, data solutions, data security and data delivery staffing models (employees/contractors) to meet the operational coverage, skillset, and financial requirements of the organization
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with primary application develop partners to ensure successful delivery of projects, continuous improvement of processes, and improved levels of service
• Define and direct implementation of data management procedures and policies to reduce operational risk, improve the reliability of the environment, and comply with various audit and regulatory requirements

What you’re made of

The bold requirements…

• Bachelor’s Degree (In lieu of a degree, equivalent relevant experience may be considered.)
• Be a proven leader in the database world (MS SQL) (Cheers! Everybody knows your name.)
• 10+ years of MS SQL database administration leadership in a large matrixed organization
• Experience managing cloud DB software projects utilizing agile methodologies in a mission-critical environment
• Adept at quickly ascertaining the technical status of issues raised, using limited information, and formulating the best possible issue-resolution plan (Troubleshooting things is a hobby of yours.)
• Good understanding of DevOps concepts, processes, and best practices
• Experience with building detailed technical artifacts to document software deployment processes (Tinkering skills are a plus.)
• In-depth knowledge of industry specific practices, with special focus on securing and monitoring cloud-based solutions
• Significant experience with project/program management practices such as resource allocation, scope management, change management, risk management, escalation, etc.
• Strong customer relationship management skills with ability to prioritize and develop creative solutions to problems
• Successful track record of managing a network of partnerships with technical teams to resolve system problems and application-specific issues
• Build strong business relationships across the organization
• Experience with big data management platforms, data taxonomy, creating company-wide data plans, data reconciliation, and data-driven growth strategies (Obviously! It IS a database administration position.)
• Requires a high level of comfort with ambiguity and working with large/complex datasets, strong problem structuring skills, analytical acumen, and solid communication and presentation skills to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Understanding of software performance tools, metrics, and benchmarks
• Godlike communications skills (verbal, written, illustrative/diagrammatic)
• You must be able to communicate effectively (read, write, speak, mumble, debate, etc.) in English, Spanish is a plus.

That something extra we´d love to see…

1. Leader/Mentor: You like it when people succeed and even more when it’s someone from your team. You advise, counsel, guide, teach, preach, and overreach, sprinkling your pixie dust so everyone can shine.
2. Self-sufficient: You work well on your own and whatever you don’t know, you figure out. You’re probably over-prepared for the apocalypse and have enough to back up the team as well. Your life motto: Bring it!
3. Planner: People can testify to the fact that your vacations are planned with Excel spreadsheets. This is not an exaggeration. Every second is invested correctly. Things run smoothly and according to plan or we get to see your dark side.
4. Strategic Thinking: You’ve played every strategy game out there. Your mother claims you were born with a chessboard instead of a placenta attached to your umbilical cord and this could well be true. You’re always 3 steps ahead of the game.
5. Collaborator: You’re the human embodiment of balance, yin & yang, harmony, equilibrium, etc. When the quarks joined to form a neutron, you were there, supervising. You seek areas of mutual agreement and consensus and inherently understand when there’s a good deal on the table.

The above description is not intended to limit the scope of the job or to exclude other duties not mentioned. It is absolutely not a final set of specifications for the position. It’s simply meant to give readers an idea of what the role entails.

Abarca Health LLC is an equal employment opportunity employer and participates in E-Verify. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of gender, race/ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, or other protected group status.