Senior Database Administrator

Position Overview

• Location Type: Remote
• Employment Type: Full-time
• Salary: Not specified

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Database Administrator. Our objective is to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone, and we persist most of this knowledge in MariaDB. Our project sites are some of the most highly visited on the internet, with more page views per engineer than any other site. As a Senior DBA at the Wikimedia Foundation, you will be part of a small, focused team of skilled and experienced engineers. In this role, you will be responsible for ensuring the health of our database systems - including their availability and performance. Your responsibilities will include troubleshooting issues, database maintenance, performance tuning, high availability, replication, backups, and general optimization as well as benchmarking and testing new MariaDB and MySQL builds. WMF is a proponent of privacy and using free and open-source software. We run a large database cluster with MariaDB on bare metal Linux hosts. The work we do is crucial and is used by hundreds of millions of people. This is a unique opportunity to make a huge impact for a good cause.

Requirements

• Primary Database: MariaDB or MySQL
• Experience: 5+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
• Linux Knowledge: Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
• SQL Proficiency: Proficiency in SQL
• High Availability: Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
• Remote Server Management: Experience with remotely managing bare-metal servers
• Communication Skills: Strong English language skills
• Teamwork: Ability to work independently in a fast paced environment, as an effective part of a globally distributed team, including ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools

Responsibilities

• Implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting of relational database systems in production and staging environments
• Handling database version upgrades, testing and working with upstream on bug identification and resolution
• Configuring replication, designing schema optimizations and running schema changes
• Monitoring, debugging and improving query performance
• Improving observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
• Multi-datacenter replication topology design, capacity and infrastructure planning
• Taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure and participating in an on call rotation
• Sharing our values and work in accordance with them

Optional Qualifications

• Proficient at automation/programming/scripting

Additional Information

• Travel: Open to travel 1-2 times a year.
• Values: Commitment to privacy and using free and open-source software.