Database Administrator Role

Location: Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Department: Roles

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

About OPEN Data Jobs

OPEN Data Jobs (ODJ) is built to craft data careers. We connect high-potential data, AI, and software professionals with meaningful work on the cutting edge of the federal sector, and our aim reaches beyond any single opening: to help you understand your strengths, find the right role, and grow throughout your career.

ODJ is organized around Roles and Openings. A Role is a durable career type, such as Data Engineer or AI Engineer: it describes the work, the skills that count, and where the path can lead. An Opening is a specific position hiring right now, with a level, a location, and an application. Roles help you see where you fit; from there, there is more than one way to move.

Today, you can apply to any Opening that fits you through our secure application system. You can also register for a Role to express interest in that broader category of work. A Role registration is not an application to every future Opening.

The work

Database Administrators keep database services available, recoverable, secure, observable, and appropriately sized. They manage the operational conditions under which database code and data run, from configuration and capacity to backups, upgrades, replication, and incident response.

The role includes establishing recovery procedures, testing restores and failover, monitoring workload health, investigating contention and resource pressure, coordinating patches, and administering privileged access. Performance work is evidence-based: Database Administrators connect application behavior, query plans, configuration, data growth, and infrastructure signals before changing a production system.

Managed database services automate parts of installation, patching, backups, scaling, and high availability, but they do not eliminate operational ownership. Teams still need people to set policy, configure services, validate recovery, tune workloads, manage access, plan version upgrades, interpret monitoring, and respond when service behavior does not match expectations.

What you may build

• Monitoring, alerting, health checks, capacity forecasts, and operational dashboards.
• Backup, restore, replication, failover, and disaster-recovery procedures with tested evidence.
• Database configuration baselines, maintenance automation, patch plans, and upgrade runbooks.
• Privileged-access controls, role administration, encryption configurations, and audit support.
• Performance investigations and remediation plans spanning queries, indexes, configuration, storage, and compute.

Who you are

You are methodical when systems are healthy and steady when they are not. You prepare for failure before it happens, keep operational evidence current, and understand that an untested backup or undocumented recovery path is not a reliable control.

You make careful production changes, communicate risk and service impact clearly, and work well with developers, architects, security teams, cloud platform teams, and service owners. You know when to automate a repeatable task and when a change needs human review.

What you bring

• Production administration experience with one or more relational database engines or managed database services.
• Hands-on knowledge of monitoring, performance diagnosis, capacity management, backups, restores, replication, and high availability.
• Experience planning patches, major-version upgrades, maintenance windows, rollback paths, and disaster-recovery tests.
• Understanding of database access control, privileged operations, encryption, audit needs, and security hardening.
• Scripting or automation skills for repeatable maintenance, evidence collection, health checks, and operational response.

What future openings may require

A future opening may require PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Amazon Relational Database Service, Azure SQL, or another specific engine or managed service. The operational model may range from self-managed infrastructure to platform-managed services, with different divisions of responsibility for patching, backups, availability, and scaling.

Workloads that support artificial intelligence (AI) may introduce vector indexes, bursty retrieval traffic, new retention patterns, or sensitive interaction data. Those are database workload characteristics to secure, monitor, tune, and recover. Model operations, AI evaluation, and AI-specific controls remain outside the Database Administrator's core ownership.

Benefits

Compensation, benefits, work location, and employment terms are set for each specific opening and will be stated with that opening

Register for Database Administrator roles

Click Apply below to register for Database Administrator roles.