Database Specialist (NCS/Job/ 3798)

Role Summary

Owns the database resilience workstream — designing and implementing non-managed MSSQL replication across regions, failover architecture, and the DR/Business Continuity documentation that the multi-region rebuild depends on.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement non-managed MSSQL replication between US-East and US-West.
• Architect witness / automatic failover design for cross-region resilience.
• Stand up in-region read replicas to offload read traffic and support availability.
• Validate PII handling and encryption to Groundworks’ existing standard (PII present, no higher sensitivity tier).
• Author DR / Business Continuity documentation for the database tier — RTO/RPO targets, failover runbooks, witness configuration, recovery validation — feeding the broader DR/BC gap.
• Partner with the DevOps specialist to ensure replication topology aligns with the dual-region AKS deployment model.
• Run failover drills / participate in tabletop exercises to validate recovery end to end.

Additional Skill-Based Responsibilities

• Availability architecture: configure SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (or equivalent non-managed replication), distributed availability groups for cross-region, and quorum/witness tuning to prevent split-brain.
• Performance engineering: index optimization, query plan analysis, partitioning, and replication-lag monitoring to keep read replicas within acceptable staleness windows.
• Backup & recovery: design full/differential/log backup schedules, validate point-in-time restore, and test restore-to-region procedures against the documented RPO.
• Security & encryption: implement TDE (Transparent Data Encryption), column-level encryption for PII, Key Vault-backed key management, and least-privilege SQL role design.
• Automation & IaC: script database provisioning, replication setup, and failover orchestration (PowerShell / T-SQL / Terraform) so DR posture is repeatable, not manual.
• Monitoring integration: surface SQL health, replication state, and failover events into Datadog alongside the application observability stack.
• Capacity & cost planning: size compute/storage tiers per region and tune for the fixed-price model without compromising the failover SLA.
• Knowledge transfer: document operational runbooks and train Groundworks’ DBA on the replication and failover procedures for post-engagement ownership.

Required Skills:

MSSQL administration, Always On / distributed availability groups, cross-region failover & witness design, read-replica configuration, TDE/column encryption & PII handling, backup/restore engineering, T-SQL/PowerShell automation, Datadog, DR/BC runbook authoring.