Tech hiring Cloud, DevOps & security
Hire database administrators who keep data recoverable.
A database administrator keeps your production databases fast, available and recoverable. They tune the slow queries, plan capacity, run replication and failover, and make sure a backup can be restored on the day it is needed. We shortlist DBAs assessed on diagnosis and recovery, not only on syntax.
01 The role
What database administrators do all week, and what comes out of it.
A database administrator is responsible for the one part of your system that cannot be rebuilt from a repository. They watch how the database is used, find the queries and locks that slow it down, decide how it is replicated and backed up, control who can read what, and carry out upgrades and schema changes without taking the product offline.
The difficulty is that almost everything is done to a live system holding data you cannot lose. An index built the wrong way locks a table at peak time. A migration that passed on a test copy runs for six hours against production. A backup that was never restored turns out to be unusable. Good DBAs are cautious by habit and rehearse anything irreversible.
Managed services such as Amazon RDS, Aurora, Cloud SQL and Azure SQL have taken over patching and basic failover, and the job has moved with them. The title is now often database reliability engineer: fewer installations, more query plans, schema review, automation and cost control. Managed does not mean tuned, and it does not mean your restore has been tested.
What they ship
- Backup and point-in-time recovery, proved by scheduled restore tests
- Replication, failover and read replicas with measured recovery targets
- Query and index tuning based on real execution plans
- Zero-downtime schema changes and major-version upgrades
- Monitoring and alerts for slow queries, locks, lag and disk growth
- Roles, row-level access, encryption and audit logging
- Migrations between engines, or from self-hosted to a managed service
02 Skills and stack
The stack, sorted by how much it matters.
Database skill does not transfer evenly between engines. A strong PostgreSQL DBA will find their way around MySQL, but vacuum, locking and replication behave differently in each. Hire for the engine you run.
Core
The role cannot be done without these.
- One engine in depth: PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQL Server
- SQL and reading execution plans
- Indexing, partitioning and query tuning
- Backup, restore and point-in-time recovery
- Replication, failover and high availability
- Transactions, locking and isolation levels
- Schema design and safe migrations
- Access control, encryption and auditing
Tooling
Varies from team to team.
- PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB, SQL Server, Oracle
- Amazon RDS and Aurora, Cloud SQL, Azure SQL
- pg_stat_statements, EXPLAIN ANALYZE, Query Store
- pgBackRest, Barman or Percona XtraBackup
- Patroni, PgBouncer or ProxySQL
- gh-ost or pt-online-schema-change
- Flyway, Liquibase or framework migrations
- Prometheus and Grafana, Datadog or pganalyze
- Terraform and Ansible
Adjacent
Useful, not required.
- MongoDB, Redis and Elasticsearch operations
- Linux, storage and network troubleshooting
- Scripting in Bash or Python
- Change data capture with Debezium
- Sharding and distributed SQL: Vitess, Citus, CockroachDB
- Data warehousing basics
- Cloud cost management
03 When to hire one
When a database administrator is the right hire, and when not.
We would sooner point you to a different role than fill the wrong one. Both lists are worth a minute.
Hire a database administrator when
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The database is the bottleneck and nobody can say why
Pages time out at peak, the instance has been upsized twice and the bill keeps rising. Someone needs to read the query plans instead of buying more hardware.
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You have never restored a backup
Backups run every night and no one has checked that they produce a working database, or how long that takes. This is the commonest serious gap we hear about.
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Schema changes have become frightening
Tables are large enough that an ordinary migration locks writes. Releases wait for a quiet hour and still cause incidents.
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A major upgrade or migration is due
An engine version is reaching end of life, or you are moving to a managed service. It has to happen with minutes of downtime and a way back.
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Auditors are asking who can see customer data
Shared credentials and broad production access no longer pass. Roles, masking and audit logs need an owner.
Look elsewhere when
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You run one small managed database
A few gigabytes on RDS or Cloud SQL rarely justifies a full-time DBA. Whoever owns your infrastructure can manage it, with occasional specialist help.
Hire DevOps engineers -
The slow queries come from application code
N+1 queries, missing pagination and work that belongs in a queue are fixed in the application. A DBA can point at them; a backend developer has to change them.
Hire software developers -
You want pipelines and a warehouse for reporting
Moving data out of production systems and modelling it for analysis is data engineering. DBAs look after the systems that data comes from.
Hire data engineers -
You need reports and dashboards from the data
Writing analytical SQL and explaining what the numbers mean is analyst work, and needs different strengths.
Hire data analysts -
It is a single upgrade or a one-off tuning exercise
A defined job with a clear end suits a short engagement better than a permanent post.
Post a freelance project
04 How we assess
Four stages, before a database administrator reaches your shortlist.
A CV says what someone claims. We test what they can do, then send you the evidence with the shortlist.
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Stage 1
Profile review
We look at the databases the candidate has actually run: which engine, how large, how busy and with what availability target. We ask what they were personally on call for, and note real migrations, upgrades and recoveries over lists of products.
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Stage 2
Technical test
A timed test covering SQL, indexing and execution plans, transactions and locking, backup and replication concepts, and practical exercises such as diagnosing a slow query or choosing a safe way to change a large table.
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Stage 3
Conversation with our team
Our engineers ask the candidate to talk through an incident and a risky change they handled: what they checked before starting, how they would have rolled back, and what they altered afterwards. We listen for caution and for evidence that restores were tested.
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Stage 4
Review and levelling
Reviewers score accuracy, speed, problem-solving, communication and teamwork, then assign a level from our engineering framework. For DBAs the notes state which engines the person knows in depth and which they have only used.
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Then
Your shortlist
Assessed candidates, with notes and scores.
The engine
Evalia
Assessments run on Evalia, the assessment platform we built ourselves. Across the ProDevs network, more than 100,000 assessments have been completed.
The levels we assign are public. Read the engineering framework, or see how a hire runs from brief to offer.
05 Seniority
How much can you hand over? It depends on the level.
The title on a CV tells you little. What matters is how much a database administrator can be handed without someone checking each step.
Junior
Owns routine operations
- Runs documented tasks: user changes, restores to test environments, health checks
- Writes sound SQL and can read a simple execution plan
- Watches dashboards and escalates anomalies with the right detail attached
- Makes production changes only from a reviewed runbook
Mid-level
Owns a production database
- Finds and fixes slow queries, lock contention and replication lag on their own
- Plans and carries out schema changes on large tables without blocking writes
- Maintains backups and replication, and runs restore and failover drills
- Reviews developers’ migrations and queries before they reach production
Senior
Owns the data tier and its risks
- Designs for availability and recovery targets, and proves they are met
- Leads engine upgrades, cloud migrations and sharding or partitioning projects
- Sets standards for schema design, access and change management across teams
- Leads the response to data incidents and advises on cost and capacity a year ahead
06 Interview questions
Interviewing a database administrator? Ask these.
For your own interviews, after ours. Each question comes with what a strong answer tends to show.
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A query that took 50 ms now takes eight seconds, and nothing was deployed. Where do you look?
A good answer shows: A changed execution plan first: stale statistics, data growth past a threshold, table bloat or parameter-sensitive plans. Then lock waits and resource contention. They compare the current plan with the earlier one before touching anything. “Add an index” without looking is a guess.
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When did you last restore a database from backup, and what did you learn?
A good answer shows: A recent, specific restore with a measured duration, ideally from a scheduled drill. They know the difference between a recovery point and a recovery time objective and can say what theirs were. Hesitation here matters more than anywhere else in the interview.
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How would you add an index or a column to a table with 500 million rows in production?
A good answer shows: Engine-specific detail: concurrent index builds in PostgreSQL, online schema change tools in MySQL, which operations rewrite the table, lock timeouts, batched backfills and a rollback plan. A candidate who would simply run the ALTER has not done it at this size.
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Replication lag on a read replica keeps growing. What could be causing it?
A good answer shows: Several candidates and a way to tell them apart: a long transaction or bulk write on the primary, single-threaded apply, an under-sized replica, slow storage, or queries on the replica blocking replay. They also ask what the application does when it reads stale data.
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What does an index cost, and how do you decide which ones to keep?
A good answer shows: Indexes slow writes, use memory and disk, and need maintenance. Strong candidates use usage statistics to find unused and duplicate indexes, understand composite column order and covering indexes, and tune for the real workload, not for one query in isolation.
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How do you carry out a major-version upgrade with only minutes of downtime?
A good answer shows: Rehearsal on a production-sized copy, a replica-based or logical-replication cutover, application compatibility checks, a clear point of no return and a tested way back. They mention checking extensions, query plan regressions and statistics after the switch.
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A developer asks for read access to production to debug an issue. What do you do?
A good answer shows: A balanced answer: time-limited, logged access to a replica or a masked copy, with sensitive columns restricted. Flat refusal pushes people towards shared passwords; unconditional access fails the next audit. They treat the request as a sign that better tooling is needed.
07 Ways to engage
Not only permanent hires. Four ways to work with a database administrator.
A permanent hire is the usual route, not the only one. Choose by how long the work lasts and who should employ the person.
- Placement fee, of first-year salary. One-time.
- 10–15%
- Replacement guarantee on direct hires.
- 2 weeks
- To a first shortlist, for most roles.
- 48h
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Direct hire
A permanent employee on your contract and your payroll. One-time placement fee of 10–15% of first-year salary.
Tech hiring -
Dedicated team
A database administrator inside a team we assemble and run for you: product, design and engineering on your roadmap, for a monthly retainer.
Dedicated teams -
Outsourcing & payroll
A full-time person in a country where you have no legal entity. ProDevs employs and pays them: 20% of salary if we find the person for you, or 5% of salary, capped at $500 a month, for payroll and compliance on someone you have already chosen.
Outsourcing -
Freelance project
A defined piece of work with a clear end. You pay the agreed price per milestone through escrow, plus a 5% client fee. Free to post.
Freelancers
08 Around the role
A database administrator is one seat. These are the others.
A database administrator sits between the developers who write the queries and the platform team who run the servers. In smaller companies the role is often part-time or merged with DevOps; it becomes a dedicated post when data volume, uptime commitments or regulation make mistakes expensive.
- Backend developers
- Reviews schema changes and slow queries, and teaches the patterns that avoid them.
- DevOps and cloud engineers
- Shares infrastructure code, instance sizing, networking and the deployment pipeline for migrations.
- Site reliability engineers
- Agrees availability targets and failover procedures, and takes part in on-call.
- Data engineers
- Provides replicas or change data capture so pipelines do not load the primary.
- Security and compliance
- Implements access roles, encryption, retention and audit logging for sensitive data.
09 Client testimonials
Hear it first-hand, from companies that hired.
Founders, operators and executives describe working with ProDevs, in their own words.
Play video: Client testimonial: Olufemi Seyi, COO, Casafina development company
Play video: Client testimonial: Aproko Doctor, Building AwaDoc
Play video: Client testimonial: JT Liddell, Promenade CEO
10 Questions
Before you hire a database administrator: the usual questions.
Something else? Book a call (opens in a new tab) and ask us directly.
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Do we still need a DBA if we use a managed database such as RDS or Aurora?
Often, yes, though for different work. A managed service handles patching, basic failover and backup storage. It does not fix slow queries, design your schema, plan a major upgrade, control who has access or check that a restore produces usable data. Below a certain size a DevOps engineer can cover this; above it, the gaps become costly.
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What is the difference between a database administrator and a data engineer?
A database administrator looks after operational databases: the ones your application reads and writes all day. A data engineer moves data out of those systems into a warehouse or lake and models it for analysis. One protects transactions and uptime; the other builds pipelines. They cooperate closely, but neither substitutes for the other.
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Should we hire a DBA for a specific database engine?
Yes. Core principles carry over, but the details that matter in an emergency do not. PostgreSQL vacuum and bloat, MySQL replication formats and SQL Server licensing and tooling are each their own body of knowledge. Tell us which engine and version you run, where it is hosted and roughly how large it is, and we shortlist against that.
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What is a database reliability engineer?
It is the DBA role approached with software engineering habits: infrastructure defined in code, migrations run through a pipeline, monitoring and alerts treated as a product, and manual work automated away. Many experienced DBAs now work this way. If your team already runs on Terraform and continuous delivery, ask for this profile explicitly.
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How quickly can I hire a database administrator?
For most roles you see a first shortlist within 48 hours of agreeing the brief, and most companies find their hire within two to three weeks. Each candidate has been through four assessment stages before you meet them. A direct hire carries a one-time placement fee of 10–15% of first-year salary and a two-week replacement guarantee.
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Can a remote DBA cover out-of-hours maintenance and on-call?
It can be arranged, and it should be agreed before the offer. Maintenance windows and on-call are part of the job for most DBAs, but the hours, the rota and how they are compensated belong in the contract. One person cannot be on call all year, so plan who shares the cover.
Talk to ProDevs
Tell us about the role.
Tell us the level and the stack. We will tell you how quickly we can put assessed database administrators in front of you.
Project work
Need it for a project instead?
Not every job needs a full-time hire. Describe the work, get proposals from vetted freelance database administrators, and pay per milestone through escrow. Free to post.