Senior Dba Consultant -postgresql & Mysql

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Job Title: Senior DBA Consultant – PostgreSQL & MySQL (Gaming Infrastructure)

Location: Ireland, remote.

Contract / Consultant

Experience Level: Senior

On-Call Requirement: Yes (Periodic Rotation)

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior DBA Consultant who is a recognised expert in PostgreSQL and MySQL, with deep experience managing mission-critical, large-scale databases in high-performance, low-latency gaming environments. The ideal candidate thrives in high-availability settings, excels at real-time data handling, and has a track record of scaling systems to support millions of daily transactions.

As a key member of the infrastructure team, you will oversee the design, performance, reliability, and growth of data systems powering live gaming platforms. You will lead efforts to resolve production issues quickly, implement robust disaster recovery plans, and help architect and tune highly available systems across hybrid (on-premise and cloud) deployments.

Expanded Key Responsibilities

Database Design, Tuning & Scaling

• Architect and optimise complex PostgreSQL and MySQL database clusters to handle high-velocity OLTP workloads.
• Implement horizontal scaling strategies (e.g., sharding, logical partitioning) to support increased load.
• Tune vertical scaling parameters such as connection pools, caching layers, buffer sizes, and memory allocation.
• Continuously improve schema design and normalisation strategies for performance and flexibility.

Query Optimization & Workload Profiling

• Analyse query patterns, slow query logs, and application metrics.
• Identify long-running or inefficient queries and collaborate with developers to refactor them.
• Implement advanced indexing strategies (partial indexes, BRIN, GIN, etc.) to reduce query latency.
• Conduct proactive workload profiling to prevent performance degradation at scale. This includes regularly benchmarking representative workloads, identifying emerging hotspots or contention areas, analysing I/O and CPU usage under various load patterns, and forecasting capacity requirements. The consultant will develop profiling automation scripts, simulate growth scenarios, and implement preemptive optimisations to safeguard against latency spikes and throughput bottlenecks as the player base or feature complexity grows.

Database Support & Deployment

• Manage and optimize databases on AWS (RDS, Aurora), Google Cloud Platform (CloudSQL), and MySQL/Postgres on Data center platforms.
• Design multi-region, fault-tolerant, and geo-replicated systems to support global game availability.
• Support both cloud-native and hybrid infrastructure environments, including Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Contribute to IaC tooling (Terraform, Ansible) to automate DB provisioning, scaling, and configuration.

High Availability, Replication, and DR

• Design and implement high availability (HA) setups using streaming replication, GTID, failover nodes, etc.
• Ensure low-latency and durable replication strategies across regions and cloud providers.
• Define and test comprehensive backup/recovery and disaster recovery (DR) procedures.
• Minimize RTO/RPO for game-critical workloads.

Monitoring, Observability & Incident Response

• Build and maintain observability dashboards using Datadog, Grafana, CloudWatch, and native DB tools.
• Set up and fine-tune alerts for key metrics (e.g., replication lag, query timeouts, cache hit ratios).
• Participate in 24/7 on-call rotations, triaging incidents and driving resolution.
• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) and contribute to post-mortems for high-impact issues.
• Work closely with DevOps, backend engineering, and SRE teams to ensure seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines.
• Provide tooling and standards for DB migrations, version control, and rollback safety.
• Mentor engineers on DB best practices, data modeling, and query tuning.

Required Skills & Experience

• 7+ years managing PostgreSQL and MySQL in production environments.
• Hands-on experience supporting OLTP systems with millions of concurrent requests.
• Mastery in schema design, performance tuning, and query analysis.
• Proficiency with AWS (RDS, Aurora), GCP (CloudSQL), and hybrid deployments.
• Solid scripting knowledge (Bash, Python) for automation and incident tooling.
• Experience with observability platforms and instrumentation.
• Ability to handle incidents calmly under pressure and provide rapid resolution.
• Knowledge of multi-region replication, HA, and DR strategies.

Nice to Have

• Prior experience in gaming infrastructure or latency-sensitive, high-throughput domains.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, containers, and DB orchestration in microservices environments.
• Exposure to infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi).
• Understanding of security, RBAC, AD, and compliance in cloud-hosted DBs.

Seniority level

• Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Contract

Job function

• Information Technology

Industries

• IT Services and IT Consulting

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