Senior Database Administrator

Vestwell is the financial technology company powering the new savings economy. The New York City-based fintech platform redefines how people save for the critical aspects of life across retirement education and healthcare savings needs. Today Vestwell enables over 350000 businesses and nearly 1.5 Million active savers with over $30 billion in assets saved across all 50 United States.

Vestwell offers a range of products including workplace-delivered retirement plans employer-offered student loan repayment benefits and various savings accounts for education emergencies and individuals with disabilities.

Vestwells platform serves a diverse clientele including financial advisers employers third-party administrators financial institutions payroll providers government agencies and individual savers. To learn more

Who Are We Looking For

Vestwell is expanding and were excited about adding a Senior Database Administrator who is passionate about building reliable secure and scalable data platforms in a modern cloud-first environment. At a high level were looking for a senior technical contributor who can own the health performance and evolution of our core relational databases that power our retirement and savings platforms.

You are comfortable operating in production making decisions under ambiguity and partnering with Engineering DevOps Security and Product teams. You bring deep expertise in PostgreSQL or another major relational database understand how to build resilient architectures in the cloud and are proactive about automation observability and best practices.

Most of all you care about doing things the right way: treating data as a product designing for scale and building systems that are easy to operate and evolve.

What Will You Be Doing

As a Senior Database Administrator you will serve as the primary owner for our production database environments responsible for availability performance reliability and security. You will design and implement database architectures tune workloads guide schema and query design and partner with engineering teams to ship features safely and efficiently.

Your responsibilities will include but are not limited to:

• Production ownership & reliability
• Own the uptime performance and operational health of production databases (primarily PostgreSQL or similar RDBMS).
• Design and maintain high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) strategies including replication backups and point-in-time recovery (PITR).
• Participate in and help mature our incident management on-call and post-incident review practices.
• Performance tuning & optimization
• Analyze and tune slow queries indexes and execution plans to support low-latency high-throughput workloads.
• Proactively monitor and optimize database configuration connection management and resource utilization.
• Partner with engineering teams on schema design query patterns and migration strategies to ensure long-term scalability.
• Architecture design & lifecycle management
• Design and evolve database schemas data models and partitioning strategies to support new products and high-growth data volumes.
• Plan and execute major upgrades migrations and refactors with minimal impact to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Collaborate with DevOps and platform teams on infrastructure choices (e.g. managed cloud databases storage networking) and capacity planning.
• Security compliance & governance
• Implement and maintain strong database security controls including authentication authorization encryption and auditing.
• Work closely with Security Compliance and Risk teams to align database practices with regulatory and internal standards.
• Define and enforce guardrails for access patterns data handling and least-privilege principles across teams.
• Automation tooling & observability
• Automate routine DBA tasks (provisioning backups failover schema migrations user management guardrails) using scripting and infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Define and maintain monitoring alerting and logging standards for database systems including SLOs and capacity thresholds.
• Contribute to internal tooling runbooks and documentation to improve operational efficiency and reduce toil.
• Cross-functional partnership & mentorship
• Partner with application engineers data engineers and DevOps to design end-to-end solutions that balance performance reliability and developer ergonomics.
• Provide guidance and best practices for SQL data modeling and database usage to engineering teams.
• Mentor other engineers in database fundamentals operational excellence and production readiness.

Requirements

The Necessities:

• 5 years of professional experience as a Database Administrator or in a closely related role with significant ownership of production relational databases.
• Deep expertise in at least one major RDBMS preferably PostgreSQL (e.g. configuration performance tuning query optimization replication and backup/restore).
• Hands-on experience in a cloud environment (e.g. AWS RDS/Aurora GCP Cloud SQL Azure Database) including designing for availability scalability and cost efficiency.
• Strong SQL skills and familiarity with at least one procedural language such as PL/pgSQL T-SQL or equivalent.
• Demonstrated experience with:
• Designing and operating HA/DR solutions (replication failover PITR).
• Implementing and managing backup and recovery strategies in production.
• Performance troubleshooting using query plans profiling and monitoring tools.
• Experience with monitoring and observability tools for databases (e.g. Datadog CloudWatch Prometheus or similar) including defining meaningful alerts and SLOs.
• Practical experience with schema design and data modeling to support application and analytics use cases.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and automation (e.g. Terraform CloudFormation Ansible or similar) and scripting in languages such as Python Bash or similar.
• Ability to work cross-functionally with engineers security and operations teams communicating complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A strong sense of ownership attention to detail and a bias toward documenting systems decisions and runbooks.

The Extras:

• Experience operating PostgreSQL at scale in a high-traffic regulated or mission-critical environment (e.g. fintech banking payments benefits platforms).
• Exposure to data warehousing and analytics ecosystems (e.g. Snowflake Redshift BigQuery) and their integration with operational databases.
• Familiarity with NoSQL or specialized data stores (e.g. Redis DynamoDB Elasticsearch) and how they complement relational databases.
• Background with CI/CD pipelines for database changes including migration tooling automated checks and rollout strategies.
• Knowledge of networking fundamentals relevant to database operations (e.g. VPC design security groups private networking peering).
• Experience contributing to capacity planning and long-term data growth strategies including partitioning archiving and lifecycle management.
• Prior experience in a startup or high-growth environment where you have helped scale systems and processes.

This role will be based in either the New York City Austin King of Prussia or Phoenix office and will be part of Vestwells hybrid in-office operation.

The expected base salary range for this position is $135K - $150K base. This position is eligible to participate in the Company Bonus Pool and is eligible to receive new hire equity in the Company. Please note that salary bands are based on NY and other similar metro areas and may differ based on where the role is ultimately hired.

OUR BENEFITS

Were an innovative high-growth company with lots of exciting milestones ahead. We value health and wellness at Vestwell and in addition to a dedicated Employee Wellbeing Committee we offer competitive health coverage and generous vacation offering. We have adopted a hybrid office policy but all employees are welcome at our bright comfortable office with many workspace options in our Midtown Manhattan Austin King of Prussia and Phoenix offices so everyone has a setting that is the most productive for them. Oh and naturally we have a great 401(k) plan!

OUR PROCESS

It starts the same for every candidate: getting to know the team members through 1-2 conversations about Vestwell your experience and your interests. Next steps can vary by role but the usual next steps are a skill or experience screen (e.g. a coding interview for an Engineer a portfolio review for a Designer deeper experience call for other roles) which leads to a virtual or in-person interview panel after that if the screens go well.Before making an offer our interview process concludes with a references check stage for your recruiter to meet with a current or former supervisor and peer.We prioritize transparency and lack of surprise throughout the process.

For your awareness you will only receive correspondence from any other domain not ending not our Recruitment team.

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