Senior Database Administrator at Paystack

About the Senior Database Administrator role

• As a Senior Database Administrator at Paystack, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, performance, and reliability of our database systems.
• You will work closely with product engineering, DevOps, and Data teams to ensure our databases are highly available, performant, and secure.
• The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in relational and non-relational database technologies, and an understanding of modern infrastructure practices including Infrastructure as Code, observability, and automation.
• The selected engineer will report directly to the Head of Infrastructure.
• You will work closely with other members of the department including members of the Devops, Observability, Security teams and quite heavily with other product engineering teams.

We’ll trust you to

• Owns database architecture and strategy end to end, often collaborating across engineering teams.
• Designs and implements database solutions that are scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant to support mission-critical payment workloads.
• Plans and executes database migrations, upgrades, and schema changes with minimal downtime.
• Builds and maintains automated database provisioning, backup, and recovery pipelines using Infrastructure as Code tools.
• Proactively identifies and resolves performance bottlenecks through query optimisation, indexing strategies, and capacity planning.
• Leverages AI-driven tools and techniques for anomaly detection, predictive performance tuning, and automated root cause analysis of database issues.
• Implements and manages database monitoring and alerting using tools like Prometheus and Grafana to ensure early detection of issues.
• Designs and enforces database security policies, including encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and audit logging.
• Leads incident response for database-related outages, conducts root cause analysis, and drives postmortems to prevent recurrence.
• Develops and maintains disaster recovery and business continuity plans for all database systems.
• Tackles ambiguous, high-risk data challenges proactively and introduces new ideas to simplify complex data architectures.

You’ll thrive in this role if you have

• 5+ years of experience as a Database Administrator or Database Reliability Engineer.
• Deep expertise with relational databases such as MySQL, including replication, partitioning, and high availability configurations.
• Solid experience with NoSQL databases such as Redis, MongoDB,.
• Experience operating databases on AWS (RDS, Aurora) or similar cloud-managed database services .
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform for provisioning and managing database infrastructure.
• Proficiency in writing scripts and automation using SQL, Python, Bash, or similar languages.
• Experience with database observability using monitoring and alerting tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch.
• Experience using AI-assisted tooling (e.g., AI-powered query advisors, LLM-based copilots, or automated performance analysers) to improve database operations and troubleshooting workflows.
• Strong understanding of database backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues in high-throughput, low-latency transactional systems.
• Ability to clearly articulate, implement, and document design decisions around data modelling and database architecture.

Beneficial

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field might be beneficial but not required.
• Experience in the fintech industry or with payment processing systems, particularly with PCI DSS compliance as it relates to data storage and handling.
• Experience with database change management and CI/CD for schema migrations (e.g., Flyway, Liquibase, gh-ost).
• Familiarity with data warehousing, analytical databases, or streaming platforms such as Kafka.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation package and benefits
• 13th month bonus
• TSG Equity compensation
• Full medical coverage
• Wellbeing stipend
• Hybrid working environment
• Smart, kind colleagues who are invested in your growth.