Database Administrator - Senior

Job Title: Database Administrator - Senior

Location: Oshawa / Toronto

Work Model: Onsite

Duration: 12 months

Extension: 1 Time

Must Haves

• Experience in designing and implementing REST API integrations and best practices
• SQL Server Administration - strong hands-on experience with SQL Server 2019, 2022 and 2025
• Multi-DBMS Experience - must have hands-on experience with at least one of: Oracle 19c, DB2/Windows, or DB2/zOS

Description / Responsibilities / Skills

Position Summary

• The DBA works closely with application support teams, infrastructure teams, developers, vendors, and project stakeholders.
• Collaborates on defining the product's data architecture
• Helps define the data product metric and KPIs aligned with business goals and objectives
• Provides oversight on data requirements and its implementation

Operational Database Support

• Monitor database health, availability, performance, storage utilization, and system reliability.
• Perform proactive troubleshooting and resolution of database-related incidents and service requests.
• Support production, test, development, disaster recovery, and high-availability environments.
• Participate in on-call support, after-hours maintenance, and emergency incident resolution as required.

Database Administration & Maintenance

• Perform database installations, migrations, refreshes, cloning, and environment setup activities.
• Manage database security, user access, roles, permissions, encryption, and compliance requirements.
• Conduct database capacity planning and storage management activities.

Change, Release & Project Support

• Support change management, deployment, and release activities following Ministry standards and ITIL practices.
• Develop and maintain operational documentation, procedures, runbooks, and support knowledge articles.
• Participate in technical reviews, root cause analysis, and post-incident activities.
• Provide technical expertise for application modernization, migration, and infrastructure upgrade initiatives.

Deliverables

• Ensure stable, secure, and reliable database operations for all supported Ministry applications.
• Maintain database availability and performance in accordance with operational service levels.
• Deliver timely resolution of incidents, problems, and operational requests.
• Support ongoing modernization and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Maintain accurate operational documentation and technical procedures.

Experience & Skill Set Requirements

Technical Knowledge and Experience - 50%

• Failover Clustering - experience in configuring and maintaining SQL Server 2019, 2022 and 2025 cluster instances
• Always On Availability Groups - deep knowledge of setup, monitoring, failover, and troubleshooting
• SQL Server Upgrades - hands on experience upgrading: SQL Server 2019 2022; SQL Server 2022 2025
• Experience with development and mainframe technologies
• Experience with middleware and gateways
• Experience in application monitoring and support
• Experience in middleware software installation, configuration, tuning and administration, as well as experience with application development
• Experience with change management and release management as processes supporting the implementation of large applications
• Experience in structured methodologies for the design, development, implementation and maintenance of applications
• Ability to analyze and solve data integrity, security, configuration and recovery issues
• Assess and test Change Requests (CRQ) with technical content and update as necessary
• Ability to participate in release promotions/implementations and patching
• A team player with a track record of meeting deadlines
• Provide end-to-end solution design, development, and unit testing, along with recommendations to achieve business outcomes aligned with business requirements, the Cluster reference architecture, and Ministry-specific objectives.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business goals and support delivery outcomes.
• Incorporate security requirements into the design, understand and comply with OPS security standards and policies.

Communication and troubleshooting - 30%

• Excellent analytical, problem-solving and decision making skills; verbal and written communication skills; interpersonal and negotiation skills
• Experience working in an agile development environment
• Ability to provide user and system documentation as required
• Contribute to the effective management of risks and issues associated with Solution designs
• Collaborate with cross-functional and distributed teams, including designers, developers, architects, project managers, and QA
• Promotes industry standards and best practices with the product teams.
• Perform thorough code reviews, including unit tests and ensure high quality of the software.
• Fix defects and support developers, testers and end users

Planning and documentation - 20%

• Write technical documentation that supports and thoroughly explains the architecture
• Deliver knowledge transfer sessions to the team on the work completed
• Produce reports and updates as required