Senior Database Administrator

Wikimedia Foundation; New York (NY); Remote; USD 109,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is looking for a Senior DBA to join their dedicated team. In this role, you will ensure the health and performance of critical database systems that support a mission to make knowledge freely available. Your expertise in MariaDB and MySQL will be vital as you tackle database maintenance, performance tuning, and optimization challenges. This remote-first organization values diversity and offers competitive salaries, making it an exciting opportunity for those looking to make a meaningful impact in the tech world. Join a team that is committed to innovation and open-source principles while working on projects that reach millions globally.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience as a DBA with strong skills in MariaDB and MySQL.
• Proficiency in SQL and experience with database performance tuning.
• Knowledge of Linux and data storage concepts is essential.

Responsibilities

• Ensure health of database systems, including availability and performance.
• Troubleshoot issues and perform database maintenance and optimization.
• Monitor and improve query performance and observability of database infrastructure.

Skills

MariaDB Administration

MySQL Administration

SQL

Database Performance Tuning

Database Replication Management

Linux

Schema Design

Incident Response

High Availability

Open Source Contributions

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science

M.Sc. in Computer Science

Tools

LAMP Stack Technologies

Memcached

Redis

Swift

Ceph

Cassandra

Job description

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior DBA. Our objective is to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone, and we persist most of this knowledge in MariaDB. Our project sites are some of the most highly visited on the internet, with more page views per engineer than any other site.

As a Senior DBA at the Wikimedia Foundation, you will be part of a small, focused team of skilled and experienced engineers. In this role, you will be responsible for ensuring the health of our database systems - including their availability and performance.

Your responsibilities will include troubleshooting issues, database maintenance, performance tuning, high availability, replication, backups, and general optimization as well as benchmarking and testing new MariaDB and MySQL builds.

WMF is a proponent of privacy and using free and open-source software. We run a large database cluster with MariaDB on bare metal Linux hosts.

The work we do is crucial and is used by hundreds of millions of people. This is a unique opportunity to make a huge impact for a good cause.

The candidate should be open to travel 1-2 times a year.

Responsibilities

• Implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting of relational database systems in production and staging environments
• Handling database version upgrades, testing and working with upstream on bug identification and resolution
• Configuring replication, designing schema optimizations and running schema changes
• Monitoring, debugging and improving query performance
• Improving observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
• Multi-datacenter replication topology design, capacity and infrastructure planning
• Taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure and participating in an on-call rotation
• Sharing our values and work in accordance with them

Qualifications

• Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database as well as replication topologies at scale
• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
• Proficiency in SQL
• Experience with debugging query performance and schema design
• Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
• Experience with remotely managing bare-metal servers
• 5+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
• Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
• 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
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
• Experience with advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) is a big plus
• Experience in architecture, design, and implementation of persistent data storage & query infrastructure
• Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based in 40+ countries. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$ 109,047 to US$ 169,455 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay.