Database Administrator

Handshakes by DC Frontiers; Kuala Lumpur; On-site; MYR 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work schedule

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Handshakes by DC Frontiers is seeking an experienced Database Reliability Engineer to own the health, performance, and resilience of our production database estate across AWS RDS, DocumentDB, and DynamoDB. You will partner with Platforms Engineering and Product Engineering to keep data systems fast, available, and secure.

This hands-on role requires strong DBA fundamentals, IaC skills (Terraform, CDKTF, CloudFormation), and a track record of upgrades, migrations, backups, and incident response.

Qualifications

• 5-7 years of production DB/RE or similar experience.
• Strong SQL for complex queries and tuning.
• Deep AWS RDS MSSQL experience plus DocumentDB and DynamoDB.
• Experience with backups, DR, and recoveries.
• Plan and execute upgrades and migrations minimizing downtime.
• IaC tools: Terraform, CDKTF or CloudFormation.
• Version-controlled schema migrations and change management.
• Knowledge of cloud networking, health checks, and troubleshooting.
• Relational and NoSQL design fundamentals.
• Strong documentation and stakeholder communication.

Responsibilities

• Own health, performance, and resilience of production databases.
• Monitor connectivity and system-level metrics; participate in on-call rotation.
• Run performance checks using AWS tooling and track trends.
• Review schema and query design for indexing and efficiency.
• Plan and execute upgrades, patches, and migrations with rollback plans.
• Own backup strategy and restore testing across managed services.
• Write and maintain IaC to provision database infrastructure.
• Manage schema migrations with clear change records.
• Monitor costs and capacity utilization; advise right-sizing.
• Collaborate with Platforms, Product Engineering, and Security teams.

Skills

Experience 5-7 years

SQL Proficiency

AWS Database Services

Performance Tuning

Backup & Recovery

Migrations & Upgrades

Infrastructure as Code

Schema Change Management

Cloud & Systems Fundamentals

Database Design

Communication

Tools

Terraform

CDKTF

CloudFormation

AWS RDS (MSSQL)

DocumentDB

DynamoDB

S3

Job description

At Handshakes, we are committed to delivering innovative and robust cloud-based solutions that drive our business forward. We are looking for an experienced Database Reliability Engineer to join our Platforms Engineering team.

In this role, you will own the health, performance, and resilience of our production database estate, working closely with Platforms Engineering and Product Engineering to keep critical data systems fast, available, and secure.

This is a hands-on operations role for someone with strong DBA fundamentals who is equally comfortable navigating cloud infrastructure and troubleshooting connectivity, health checks, and system-level issues.

Responsibilities

• Database Performance & Optimization: Write, review, and optimize SQL queries; identify long-running or resource-intensive queries and work with engineering teams to resolve them.
• Reliability Operations & On-Call: Monitor database health, connectivity, and system-level metrics across production environments, participating in on-call rotation to proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact users.
• Performance Monitoring: Run regular performance checks and capacity reviews on AWS RDS instances, using native tooling (Performance Insights, CloudWatch) to track query and resource trends over time.
• Database Design & Recommendations: Review database schema and query design, and propose recommendations to improve indexing, query efficiency, and overall database performance.
• Upgrades & Migrations: Plan and execute database version upgrades, patching, and migrations (including cross-engine or cross-environment migrations) with minimal downtime and clear rollback plans.
• Backup & Restoration: Own backup strategy, retention, and restoration testing across managed database services, ensuring recovery objectives (RPO/RTO) are consistently met.
• Infrastructure as Code: Write and maintain IaC (e.g. Terraform, CDKTF) to provision and manage database infrastructure such as RDS instances, parameter groups, and DynamoDB tables.
• Schema Change Management: Own version-controlled schema migrations, ensuring changes are reviewed, auditable, and reversible, with clear documentation and change records.
• Cost & Capacity Management: Monitor database costs and capacity utilisation, recommending right-sizing, storage autoscaling, and reserved capacity purchases where appropriate.
• Cloud & Systems Troubleshooting: Navigate AWS infrastructure to diagnose issues spanning networking, connectivity, IAM permissions, and compute, beyond the database layer itself.
• Collaboration: Work closely with Platforms Engineering, Product Engineering, and Security teams to align database operations with broader platform reliability and governance goals.

Required Skills & Experience

• Experience: 5-7 years of experience in a Database Administrator, Database Reliability Engineer, or similar role supporting production systems.
• SQL Proficiency: Strong hands-on ability to write, review, and optimize complex SQL queries across relational database engines.
• AWS Database Services: Deep, hands-on expertise with AWS RDS (MSSQL) — including query tuning, indexing, replication, and patching — plus working-level proficiency with DocumentDB and DynamoDB (data modeling, throughput/partition design, and troubleshooting) and S3 for backup and data storage. Comfortable ramping up quickly on an unfamiliar engine using AWS-native tooling.
• Performance Tuning: Demonstrated experience identifying long-running queries, tuning indexes, and improving query execution plans.
• Backup & Recovery: Practical experience designing and testing backup, restoration, and disaster recovery procedures for production databases.
• Migrations & Upgrades: Experience planning and executing database upgrades and migrations, including assessing compatibility and minimizing downtime.
• Infrastructure as Code: Working knowledge of IaC tools (e.g. Terraform, CDKTF, or CloudFormation), with hands-on ability to write or modify code to provision database infrastructure.
• Schema Change Management: Familiarity with version-controlled schema migration practices, ensuring database changes are tracked, reviewed, and reversible.
• Cloud & Systems Fundamentals: Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure fundamentals — connectivity, networking, health checks, and basic troubleshooting — beyond the database layer.
• Database Design: Understanding of relational and NoSQL database design principles, with the ability to recommend schema or indexing improvements.
• Communication: Ability to clearly document findings, recommendations, and incident write-ups for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-Have

• Broader IaC experience across platform infrastructure (not limited to databases), contributing to shared Terraform/CDKTF modules.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, CloudWatch, or Prometheus/Grafana for database and system metrics.
• Familiarity with data governance, security, or compliance frameworks (e.g. ISO 27001) relevant to database and data handling practices.

* Work Arrangement - 3 days work in office on hybrid working as per company policy.

Why Join Us

• Own a critical part of the platform's reliability, with direct impact on system performance and customer experience.
• Work across a modern AWS-based data stack spanning relational, document, and key-value database services.
• Be part of a dynamic, innovative, and growth-focused engineering team.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and a collaborative work environment.

If you're a detail-oriented database professional who enjoys keeping critical systems fast, reliable, and well-governed, we'd love to hear from you!