Senior Database Administrator

Description:
Onsite in Washington, DC

The organization is a premier technology integrator delivering technical, engineering, intelligence, and enterprise IT solutions across mission and enterprise lifecycles. Teams design, develop, and sustain offerings that support diplomatic missions, defense requirements, and exploration from the ocean floor to outer space, maintaining leadership in supply chain, hardware integration, and global network integration with a commitment to ethics and integrity.

Due to federal security clearance requirements, applicant must be a United States Citizen or Permanent Resident. This is a contract to hire opportunity. Applicants must be willing and able to work on a w2 basis and convert to FTE following contract duration. For our w2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance.

Rate: $55.00 to $65.00/hr. w2

Responsibilities:
Responsibilities

• Design, configure, administer, and troubleshoot SQL Server Always On Availability Groups for mission-critical production environments.
• Manage AG architectures including listeners, replicas, quorum, synchronization modes, and failover strategies.
• Perform planned and unplanned failovers, disaster recovery testing, and high-availability validation.
• Troubleshoot AG issues including replication lag, failover failures, connection routing, and performance degradation.
• Support Always On across on-premises, VMware, and Azure environments and enable low-downtime deployments.
• Own and execute mandatory monthly patching for SQL Server and Oracle, including CUs, service packs, hotfixes, and quarterly PSU/CPU.
• Coordinate database patching with OS and infrastructure cycles, including pre- and post-patch validation and rollback verification.
• Maintain patching documentation, compliance evidence, validation checklists, and audit artifacts, including STIG-driven and emergency patching.
• Install, configure, and manage SQL Server instances and tools such as SSMS, SSRS, SSIS, and SSAS.
• Administer clustering, replication, log shipping, and mirroring solutions.
• Monitor performance, integrity, availability, and security and perform maintenance such as index rebuilds, statistics updates, and DBCC checks.
• Plan and execute upgrades, migrations, and platform transitions including on-premises to cloud.
• Analyze execution plans, optimize SQL, and resolve blocking, deadlocks, and bottlenecks.
• Use monitoring tools including SQL Profiler, Extended Events, and Performance Monitor.
• Manage users, roles, and permissions following least-privilege principles and maintain audit logs.
• Document architectures, Always On designs, patching procedures, and runbooks and report on availability, patching status, performance, capacity, and growth.
• Participate in on-call rotation and after-hours support for patching and outage events, including mandatory monthly patching windows.

Experience Requirements:
Experience Requirements

• Expert-level experience with SQL Server Always On Availability Groups in production, including design, deployment, and troubleshooting.
• Proven ownership of enterprise database patching cycles with monthly and emergency patching.
• Experience applying SQL Server CUs and Oracle quarterly patches in high-availability environments with minimal or zero downtime.
• Proficiency with SQL Server clustering, Always On AGs, and on-premises to Azure migrations.
• Hands-on administration of SQL Server 2012-2019 and Oracle across on-premises, VMware, and Azure.
• Experience with Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server STIG compliance, and Transparent Data Encryption.
• Experience with Oracle RAC, Oracle Enterprise Manager, RMAN, Data Guard, and Oracle RAC on Windows.
• Proficiency in Linux shell scripting and experience with AWS RDS and EC2-based databases.
• Strong performance troubleshooting and SQL optimization skills.
• Knowledge of AWS concepts required for database operations.
• Experience with disaster recovery testing, recommendations, and on-call production support.
• Experience supporting 24×7 enterprise production environments (preferred).
• Advanced expertise with Always On AGs across hybrid and cloud architectures (preferred).
• Experience automating maintenance, health checks, and patching validation (preferred).
• Experience administering SQL Server and Oracle on Linux and Windows (preferred).
• Experience with large-scale migrations, upgrades, backups, and restores (preferred).
• Knowledge of compliance-driven operations including STIGs and audit readiness (preferred).
• Strong collaboration skills and willingness to participate in on-call rotations (preferred).

Education Requirements:
Education Requirements

• Oracle and SQL Server certifications.
• Candidates must be eligible to obtain a public trust clearance.