Senior DBA (MySQL & PostgreSQL) — Scale & Impact

Takealot Group; Cape Town; On-site; ZAR 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Staff discount

Job summary

Takealot Group in Cape Town, South Africa, seeks a Senior Database Administrator to join the Engineering & Product team. You will deploy, operate, and manage high-availability databases supporting Takealot features, troubleshoot issues, and drive performance improvements.

You will mentor junior DBAs, contribute to the team roadmap, and collaborate with development, networking, and systems teams to ensure secure, scalable database architectures in a fast-paced, agile environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or 5–7 years of relevant DBA experience.
• Strong expertise with MySQL and PostgreSQL, including deployment and operations.
• Experience with non-RDBMS systems such as MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch or Solr.
• Solid knowledge of networking, operating systems and security for databases.
• Experience delivering projects independently and collaborating in teams.
• Deep knowledge of backups, replication, monitoring, disaster recovery and security.
• Scripting and Infrastructure as Code for database infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Troubleshoot slow queries and help developers optimise SQL.
• Assist with schema design, schema changes, and admin tasks.
• Design and execute operational excellence through metrics, monitoring and documentation.
• Design and implement backups, replication, security, and disaster recovery.
• Oversee performance, integrity and security of corporate databases.
• Maintain existing database systems and ensure optimum operation.
• Ensure backups and DR systems are functional and tested.
• Design database optimisations to improve performance.
• Manage architecture changes and ensure compliance with standards.
• Assist with design and administration of database cloud infrastructure as IaC.
• Participate in technical reviews and contribute solutions.
• Collaborate with development, network and systems teams to meet requirements.
• Identify and resolve database-related issues promptly.
• Report health and metrics to stakeholders; mentor junior DBAs.

Skills

Database performance tuning

Query optimisation

Troubleshooting

Collaboration

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

5–7 years of related experience

Tools

MySQL

PostgreSQL

SQL Server

Oracle

MongoDB

Redis

Kafka

Elasticsearch

Solr

Kubernetes

Job description

Takealot Group in Cape Town, South Africa, seeks a Senior Database Administrator to join the Engineering & Product team. You will deploy, operate, and manage high-availability databases supporting Takealot features, troubleshoot issues, and drive performance improvements.

You will mentor junior DBAs, contribute to the team roadmap, and collaborate with development, networking, and systems teams to ensure secure, scalable database architectures in a fast-paced, agile environment.