Senior Database Administrator

Who Are We Looking For?

Vestwell is expanding and we’re excited about adding a Senior Database Administrator (DBA) who is passionate about building reliable, secure, and scalable data platforms in a modern cloud-first environment. At a high level, we’re looking for a senior technical contributor who can own the health, performance, and evolution of our core relational databases that power our retirement and savings platforms.

You are comfortable operating in production, making decisions under ambiguity, and partnering with Engineering, DevOps, Security, and Product teams. You bring deep expertise in PostgreSQL or another major relational database, understand how to build resilient architectures in the cloud, and are proactive about automation, observability, and best practices.

Most of all, you care about doing things the right way: treating data as a product, designing for scale, and building systems that are easy to operate and evolve.

What Will You Be Doing?

As a Senior Database Administrator, you will serve as the primary owner for our production database environments, responsible for availability, performance, reliability, and security. You will design and implement database architectures, tune workloads, guide schema and query design, and partner with engineering teams to ship features safely and efficiently.

Your responsibilities will include, but are not limited to:

• Production ownership & reliability
• Own the uptime, performance, and operational health of production databases (primarily PostgreSQL or similar RDBMS).
• Design and maintain high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies, including replication, backups, and point-in-time recovery (PITR).
• Participate in and help mature our incident management, on-call, and post-incident review practices.
• Performance tuning & optimization
• Analyze and tune slow queries, indexes, and execution plans to support low-latency, high-throughput workloads.
• Proactively monitor and optimize database configuration, connection management, and resource utilization.
• Partner with engineering teams on schema design, query patterns, and migration strategies to ensure long-term scalability.
• Architecture, design, & lifecycle management
• Design and evolve database schemas, data models, and partitioning strategies to support new products and high-growth data volumes.
• Plan and execute major upgrades, migrations, and refactors with minimal impact to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Collaborate with DevOps and platform teams on infrastructure choices (e.g., managed cloud databases, storage, networking) and capacity planning.
• Security, compliance, & governance
• Implement and maintain strong database security controls, including authentication, authorization, encryption, and auditing.
• Work closely with Security, Compliance, and Risk teams to align database practices with regulatory and internal standards.
• Define and enforce guardrails for access patterns, data handling, and least-privilege principles across teams.
• Automation, tooling, & observability
• Automate routine DBA tasks (provisioning, backups, failover, schema migrations, user management, guardrails) using scripting and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Define and maintain monitoring, alerting, and logging standards for database systems, including SLOs and capacity thresholds.
• Contribute to internal tooling, runbooks, and documentation to improve operational efficiency and reduce toil.
• Cross-functional partnership & mentorship
• Partner with application engineers, data engineers, and DevOps to design end-to-end solutions that balance performance, reliability, and developer ergonomics.
• Provide guidance and best practices for SQL, data modeling, and database usage to engineering teams.
• Mentor other engineers in database fundamentals, operational excellence, and production readiness.

Requirements

The Necessities: 

• 5+ years of professional experience as a Database Administrator or in a closely related role, with significant ownership of production relational databases.
• Deep expertise in at least one major RDBMS, preferably PostgreSQL (e.g., configuration, performance tuning, query optimization, replication, and backup/restore).
• Hands-on experience in a cloud environment (e.g., AWS RDS/Aurora, GCP Cloud SQL, Azure Database), including designing for availability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with at least one procedural language such as PL/pgSQL, T-SQL, or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience with:
• Designing and operating HA/DR solutions (replication, failover, PITR).
• Implementing and managing backup and recovery strategies in production.
• Performance troubleshooting using query plans, profiling, and monitoring tools.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools for databases (e.g., Datadog, CloudWatch, Prometheus, or similar), including defining meaningful alerts and SLOs.
• Practical experience with schema design and data modeling to support application and analytics use cases.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, or similar) and scripting in languages such as Python, Bash, or similar.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with engineers, security, and operations teams, communicating complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A strong sense of ownership, attention to detail, and a bias toward documenting systems, decisions, and runbooks.

The Extras:

• Experience operating PostgreSQL at scale in a high-traffic, regulated, or mission-critical environment (e.g., fintech, banking, payments, benefits platforms).
• Exposure to data warehousing and analytics ecosystems (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery) and their integration with operational databases.
• Familiarity with NoSQL or specialized data stores (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch) and how they complement relational databases.
• Background with CI/CD pipelines for database changes, including migration tooling, automated checks, and rollout strategies.
• Knowledge of networking fundamentals relevant to database operations (e.g., VPC design, security groups, private networking, peering).
• Experience contributing to capacity planning and long-term data growth strategies, including partitioning, archiving, and lifecycle management.
• Prior experience in a startup or high-growth environment where you have helped scale systems and processes.

This role will be based in either the New York City, Austin, King of Prussia, or Phoenix office, and will be part of Vestwell's hybrid in-office operation.

The expected base salary range for this position is $135K - $150K base. This position is eligible to participate in the Company Bonus Pool and is eligible to receive new hire equity in the Company. Please note that salary bands are based on NY and other similar metro areas and may differ based on where the role is ultimately hired.