Engineer - Database Administration at Safaricom Kenya

Reporting to the Engineering Lead – Financial Services IT, the position holder will be responsible for Administration, Performance tuning and 3rd line support of ALL Enterprise Database (DB) Systems for systems within Financial services IT. The databases span from Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, Mongo, Cassandra and Hadoop related database platforms.

Role purpose:

• Database administration and support lifecycle including backup/recovery, automation, Maintenance.
• Ensure 99.99% availability maintained for all critical databases.
• Ensure tickets raised are responded to within the agreed SLA;
• Ensure regular reviews on information lifecycle management policies is conducted.
• Ensure optimal performance of all systems maintained conforming to the SLA agreements between business and Quality Assurance.
• Implement open-source databases as an alternative to existing proprietary solutions. 
• Monitoring performance and managing parameters to provided fast query performance to front end users ensuring performance of production databases.
• Monitoring including system logs, events and correlation and maintain performance statistics and setting baseline statistics.
• Gathering database statistics and ensuring statistics gathering jobs are scheduled so as not to affect product traffic and implementing recommendations after careful analyses.
• Monitoring and managing high availability components such as RAC, Data Guard, RMAN, ASM and underlying infrastructure for mission critical databases.
• Developing, managing, and testing backup and recovery plans and ensuring storage, archiving, back-up and recovery procedures are functioning properly.
• Take lead role in the various lT audits in providing necessary information and enforcing closure of audit, change management and compliance issues.
• Manage key I.T. risks for all database systems and ensure proper mitigation.
• Take lead role in BCP and disaster recovery preparedness through periodic testing as scheduled and update of disaster recovery procedures and sharing the results with management.
• Team up with applications support, development and infrastructure team in the development, implementation, management applications, infrastructure, and monitor system health to proactively identify weaknesses and address them.
• Perform database tasks such as schema design, capacity planning, maintenance,
• Considering both back-end organization of data and front-end accessibility for end-users and further refining the physical design to meet system storage requirements.
• Installing database management systems (RDBMS) using best practice; ensure compliance with RDBMS license agreements
• Creating and maintaining database documentation, including data standards, procedures, and definitions for the data dictionary (metadata) and maintain all technical documentation relating to database management.
• Communicating regularly with technical, applications and operational staff to ensure database integrity and security.
• Perform under limited supervision, maintain reliability of data and databases, and assisting developing and implementing standards for database maintenance and configuration.
• Applying database patches to the various databases using a strategy that has least service impact.
• Carrying out database upgrades to the various databases using a strategy that has least service impact.
• Tablespace management/expansion and validating health of grid and ASM.
• Handling database migrations from old hardware to new hardware and taking lead on the databases during projects.
• Taking lead on database load tests and performance tuning during projects.
• Responding to database related incidents and providing RCAs.
• Advising on and implementing database audit strategy that doesn’t affect performance of the database.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Degree in Computer Science or Technical Related Field;
• With at least 2 years hands on Experience in Managing large databases;
• Experience in NoSQL databases, MySQL and other OpenSource databases platforms
• Experience in Oracle RAC, Dataguard, RMAN and Engineered systems.
• Experience in Linux/Unix and Windows Operating system.
• Database Systems Administration Techniques – understanding of DB Performance tuning on various Operating Systems, good troubleshooting skills, Database Migration, and ILM techniques
• Attention to details and analytical thinking.
• Certifications –OCP, OCE; EXADATA Administration; MSSQL Server Administration; Hadoop Administration; Linux/ UNIX certification

Additional Details                                                            

• Knowledge in below is an added advantage.
• Oracle Fusion and Weblogic administration
• Cassandra, Mongo or any other NoSQL database

Last Date to Apply: Mar 21, 2023