Job Description

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them.
Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself.
The Senior Database Administrator is responsible for designing, implementing, managing, and supporting both production and development database environments. This role ensures high availability, minimal downtime, and optimal performance across mission-critical data systems. You will collaborate closely with software engineers to evolve data models, support application development, and enable advanced analytics.
The primary focus is on MySQL databases running on AWS Aurora, with additional responsibilities for DynamoDB, Redis, and Redshift.
What you will do:

• Architect, maintain, and optimize MySQL databases supporting 24x7 production workloads.
• Ensure minimal downtime and high performance through proactive tuning, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Execute maintenance, security releases, patches, and database upgrades.
• Lead troubleshooting efforts for production database issues, including on-call support.
• Partner with developers to define and evolve data models, schema changes, and deployment workflows.
• Administer DynamoDB, Redis, and Redshift environments as part of the broader data ecosystem.
• Implement and maintain high-availability and disaster-recovery frameworks, leveraging replication and cloud-native solutions.
• Manage schema versioning and lifecycle from development through production releases.
• Establish database security standards, backup strategies, retention policies, and auditing controls.
• Design and deploy database management and monitoring tools to drive operational excellence.
• Support scalability initiatives, including sharding and cloud-based horizontal expansion.
• Utilize AWS services including CloudWatch, S3, Route 53, CloudFormation, and monitoring platforms (Datadog, AppDynamics).
• Contribute within an agile development environment, demonstrating autonomy, ownership, and strong communication across teams.

What you will bring:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or equivalent field.
• 6+ years of MySQL production DBA experience (design, implementation, backup/recovery, monitoring, performance tuning).
• Proven 24x7 production support experience with strong troubleshooting skills.
• 5+ years running systems in AWS cloud environments.
• 5+ years managing databases on AWS managed services (Aurora MySQL, RDS, Redshift, EC2-hosted MySQL).
• Hands-on experience with database monitoring and performance tools (CloudWatch, Datadog, AppDynamics).
• Expertise in high-availability architectures and replication methodologies.
• Experience executing live schema changes with minimal downtime.
• Demonstrated ability to implement database management tooling across large-scale environments.
• Familiarity with AWS ecosystem services such as S3, Route 53, and CloudFormation.
• Experience with version control systems (Git/GitHub).
• Strong understanding of full database schema lifecycle management.
• Experience with database security, backup strategies, and retention policies.
• Proven experience scaling databases vertically and horizontally (including key-based sharding).
• Experience managing NoSQL systems (DynamoDB, Redis, or equivalent).
• Solid proficiency with Linux/Unix OS-level performance tuning.

This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities and qualifications of the job. The employer has the right to revise this job description at any time. You will be evaluated in part based on your performance of the responsibilities and/or tasks listed in this job description. You may be required perform other duties that are not included on this job description. The job description is not a contract for employment, and either you or the employer may terminate employment at any time, for any reason, as per terms and conditions of your employment contract.
We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to diversity. All individuals, regardless of personal characteristics, are encouraged to apply. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, religion, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other status protected by applicable state or local law.

Skills Required