Senior Database Administrator

Stack

Responsibilities

• ▹Operate and evolve multi-region CockroachDB clusters and PostgreSQL instances across production, staging and development
• ▹Investigate contention, serialization retries (SQLSTATE 40001) and range hotspots in the transaction paths behind bets, wagers, settlements and payouts
• ▹Diagnose leaseholder placement, monotonic-key write pressure and cross-region latency
• ▹Trace a slow query to its execution plan, the plan to optimizer behavior, and the behavior to the schema or application call path that caused it
• ▹Catch plan regressions after statistics changes, schema changes, data growth or releases, and turn the fix into a safer rollout pattern
• ▹Assess schema-change and backfill risk before it reaches large tables: lock behavior, retry pressure, capacity impact and rollback path
• ▹Plan capacity, scaling events and version upgrades that customers do not feel
• ▹Build database observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, Loki and Snowflake: dashboards backed by real queries, alerting on leading indicators and SLO tracking
• ▹Connect database symptoms to application behavior and business events
• ▹Join the on-call rota for the data layer, lead incident analysis and drive blameless postmortems
• ▹Build Go and Python tools that make incidents easier to understand: log collectors, explain-plan analyzers, migration checks, capacity models and runbook generators
• ▹Automate provisioning, configuration, backup and recovery with Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools
• ▹Work with platform engineering on CI/CD, deployment safety and change management for database-touching services
• ▹Use Claude Code, Codex and similar harnesses daily to investigate incidents, generate probes, draft runbooks and write tooling, verifying output against production facts
• ▹Evaluate AI-assisted observability and anomaly detection and share what works
• ▹Implement and audit access controls, authentication, authorization and encryption in transit and at rest
• ▹Support data-protection, audit-logging and retention requirements for a regulated gaming platform
• ▹Build a database center of excellence: documentation, standards and reusable patterns
• ▹Mentor engineers on database fundamentals, distributed-systems behavior and operational discipline
• ▹Read CockroachDB and PostgreSQL internals when a problem needs a code-level answer

Requirements

• ▹5+ years operating production relational databases as a DBA, Database Reliability Engineer or Data Platform Engineer
• ▹Deep production experience with PostgreSQL, CockroachDB or another relational database management system, with fluency in the tradeoffs behind isolation, consensus, locality and query planning
• ▹Understanding of how a SQL engine works under the hood: MVCC, the Volcano iterator execution model and cost-based optimizer frameworks such as Cascades, applied to indexing strategy and execution plan analysis
• ▹Working knowledge of distributed-systems fundamentals: consensus (Raft and Paxos), distributed transactions, consistency models and failure modes
• ▹Ability to write tools and automation in Python or Go, and to debug and suggest fixes to line-of-business code in Java or a similar language
• ▹Experience with infrastructure-as-code and a monitoring and observability stack such as Grafana or Datadog
• ▹UNIX/Linux administration with shell scripting, comfort on a cloud platform (AWS preferred, Azure or GCP welcome)
• ▹Willingness to join an on-call rota
• ▹Clear technical writing and speech, working across teams

Nice to have

• ▹Shipped Go or Python tooling for database operations, performance analysis, migration safety or incident response that other engineers then used
• ▹Investigated production incidents end to end using metrics, logs, query fingerprints, execution plans and source-level reasoning
• ▹Owned a database platform through on-call, post-incident repair, standards and cross-team adoption
• ▹Used AI coding agents in real engineering work, with review habits that keep generated output tied to evidence
• ▹Run CockroachDB in production
• ▹Contributed to an open-source database such as PostgreSQL
• ▹Worked with streaming infrastructure such as Kafka and Materialize
• ▹Worked with a modern data warehouse or analytics platform such as ClickHouse Cloud or Snowflake
• ▹Practiced SRE along the lines of the Google SRE books

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹Competitive pay and benefits
• ▹Flexible vacation allowance
• ▹Hybrid / remote working environment
• ▹Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand
• ▹Opportunity to build products enjoyed by millions
• ▹Team gatherings around the US and Europe
• ▹Employer-sponsored training and conference attendance
• ▹AI-first environment with access to the tools you need

About the company

Hard Rock Digital aims to become the best online sportsbook, casino and social gaming company in the world. Every bet and payout on its platform is a database transaction that has to be fast and accurate.