Senior Database Administrator

Prose On Pixels; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Havas Creative in the United States seeks a Senior Database Administrator to own enterprise SQL Server environments. You will manage SQL Server 2019 and newer across development, QA, staging, reporting, and production workloads, driving reliability, security, and performance.

The role demands 7+ years of experience, strong automation, and leadership in complex production support. The ideal candidate will implement Always On, optimize queries, and collaborate with developers on schema and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional database administration experience.
• Senior ownership of enterprise Microsoft SQL Server environments.
• Deep SQL Server troubleshooting, security, and performance expertise.
• Strong automation practices and scripting ability.
• Ability to lead complex production support, upgrades, security, and recovery initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Administer, monitor, tune, patch, upgrade, and troubleshoot SQL Server 2019+ environments.
• Own backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures with testing.
• Implement high-availability solutions such as Always On and appropriate failover architectures.
• Analyze execution plans, indexes, waits, memory, and concurrency issues.
• Create maintenance standards for backups, jobs, retention, and capacity.
• Administer security using least privilege, RBAC, encryption, auditing, and access reviews.
• Partner with developers and data engineers on schema design, procedures, and performance.
• Automate tasks using T-SQL, PowerShell, SQL Agent, and source control.
• Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and stakeholder communication.
• Provide leadership for migrations, Azure SQL adoption, and hybrid modernization.
• Support BI workloads with SSIS/SSRS/SSAS and Power BI connectivity.
• Maintain runbooks, architecture diagrams, and support documentation.

Skills

SQL Server

T-SQL

PowerShell

Automation

Incident response

Tools

SQL Server 2019+

Always On

SSIS/SSRS/SSAS

SQLCMD

SQL Agent

Azure SQL

Monitoring platforms

Job description

Agency :

Havas Creative

Job Description :

The Senior Database Administrator is a hands‑on senior technical role responsible for the reliability, availability, security, performance, recoverability, and lifecycle management of enterprise Microsoft SQL Server environments. The position owns operational and strategic administration of SQL Server 2019 and later across development, QA, staging, reporting, and production workloads. The successful candidate brings a minimum of seven years of database administration experience, deep SQL Server troubleshooting expertise, strong automation practices, and the ability to lead complex production support, upgrade, security, and recovery initiatives.

• Administer, monitor, tune, patch, upgrade, and troubleshoot SQL Server 2019 and newer environments.

• Own database integrity, availability, backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures, including recurring recovery testing.

• Implement and support high-availability solutions such as Always On Availability Groups and appropriate failover architectures.

• Analyze execution plans, indexes, statistics, waits, memory, tempdb, storage, blocking, deadlocks, and concurrency issues.

• Create database maintenance standards for consistency checks, backups, index/statistics care, jobs, retention, and capacity.

• Administer security using least privilege, role-based access, encryption, auditing, service-account governance, and access reviews.

• Partner with developers and data engineers on schema design, stored procedures, query performance, releases, and rollback planning.

• Automate operational tasks using T-SQL, PowerShell, SQLCMD, SQL Agent, source control, and approved monitoring platforms.

• Lead database incident response, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and stakeholder communication.

• Provide technical leadership for SQL Server migrations, consolidations, upgrades, Azure SQL adoption, and hybrid modernization.

• Support Microsoft BI and integration workloads where SQL Server is a source or platform, including SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, and Power BI connectivity.

• Maintain architecture diagrams, configuration baselines, runbooks, escalation procedures, and support documentation.

Qualification:

Minimum 7 years of professional database administration experience, including senior ownership of enterprise Microsoft SQL Server environments.

Advanced production experience with SQL Server 2019 or later, including installation, configuration, patching, security, performance, backup/recovery, and troubleshooting.

Advanced T‑SQL and deep understanding of SQL Server internals, indexing, query optimization, transactions, locking, and concurrency.

Hands‑on experience with HA/DR technologies and validated recovery procedures.

Strong Windows Server, authentication, storage, networking, service account, certificate, and permission fundamentals.

Experience automating DBA work with PowerShell, T‑SQL, and source‑controlled scripts.

Experience leading complex incidents and communicating clearly under production pressure.

Measures of Success

Improved database availability, recovery confidence, and adherence to maintenance and patching standards.

Reduced recurring incidents and improved response time through monitoring, automation, and documented runbooks.

Measurable improvements in critical query and workload performance.

Secure, auditable, least‑privilege database access with clear ownership and review practices.

Successful upgrades and migrations with validated rollback and recovery plans.

General Competencies

Hands‑on ownership, sound judgment, attention to detail, and disciplined follow‑through.

Clear written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Ability to mentor team members, lead design or incident reviews, and document repeatable standards.

Commitment to security, data privacy, responsible technology use, and continuous learning.

Contract Type :

Permanent

Here at Havas across the group we pride ourselves on being committed to offering equal opportunities to all potential employees and have zero tolerance for discrimination. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability and other factors that have no bearing on an individual’s ability to perform their job.