Staff Database Administrator at Wikimedia Foundation

You are responsible for:

• Ensure the health and performance of Wikimedia’s production relational database systems, and the structural integrity of its data.
• Deploy, maintain and troubleshoot relational database systems in production, development and staging environments
• Design, implement, manage and automate (multi-site) replication topologies
• Consult in the design of database schemas and queries, and implement/oversee database schema changes in production
• Monitor, debug and optimize database query performance
• Improve observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
• Capacity and infrastructure planning, including (on-prem) bare-metal hardware
• Contribute to the automation of common database management workflows
• Enable the reliable generation and timely restoration of database backups
• Maintain relationships with the MariaDB upstream projects/organizations, and working with upstream developers on bug identification and resolution
• Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation shared across the team - taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure.

Skills and Experience:

• Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database, including complex replication topologies at scale
• Advanced proficiency in SQL and query/schema optimization
• Experience with debugging query performance and schema design
• Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
• Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
• 6+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
• Solid English language skills
• Ability to travel 1-2 times a year
• 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
• B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science, or equivalent work experience