Sr SQL Administrator at Penumbra in Alameda, CA

Job description

The Senior SQL Administrator is responsible for the administration, performance, availability, security, recoverability, and integrity of enterprise database platforms across on-premises and cloud-based environments. This position designs, implements, monitors, optimizes, and supports highly available database platforms used by businesses, manufacturing, quality, reporting, integration, and infrastructure systems. Serving as a database subject matter expert, the Sr. SQL Database Administrator partners with Infrastructure, Applications, Security, Quality, and business teams to maintain stable, secure, scalable, and compliant database services across on-premises and cloud environments. Specific Duties and Responsibilities Database Operations, Availability & Performance: • Manage the day-to-day operations of enterprise database platforms, including configuration, maintenance, patching, backups, restores, performance, security, and capacity. • Administer, maintain, and optimize Microsoft SQL Server environments across on-premises, virtualized, and cloud-hosted platforms. • Monitor database health, performance, job execution, storage utilization, blocking, deadlocks, replication, availability groups, and backup success. • Perform database performance tuning, including query analysis, indexing strategy, execution plan review, statistics maintenance, wait analysis, and resource optimization. • Implement and support high availability and disaster recovery solutions, including SQL Server Always On Availability Groups, clustering, log shipping, replication, backups, and restore testing. • Plan and execute database maintenance activities, including index maintenance, integrity checks, patching, upgrades, and lifecycle management. • Support database capacity planning, storage forecasting, performance baselining, and scalability planning for business-critical systems. • Provide after hours on-call support on a rotation schedule with other staff members. Security, Access Control & Data Integrity: • Maintain database security controls, including authentication, authorization, least-privilege access, role-based permissions, encryption, auditing, and privileged access review. • Partner with Security and Infrastructure teams to support secure database connectivity, certificate use, service accounts, firewall rules, vulnerability remediation, and patch compliance. • Protect the integrity of enterprise data through routine DBCC checks, backup validation, restore testing, change review, and controlled release practices. • Review and support database changes, schema updates, stored procedures, SQL Agent jobs, integrations, and application releases to reduce operational risk. • Maintain database inventory, configuration standards, operational documentation, recovery procedures, and support runbooks. Troubleshooting, Automation & Continuous Improvement: • Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for complex database incidents, performance degradation, failed jobs, restore issues, connectivity problems, and application-impacting database events. • Develop and maintain automation for database maintenance, monitoring, alerting, reporting, backup validation, user access review, and operational support activities. • Create tools, dashboards, procedures, and documentation to support IT, Applications Development, Client Support, Quality, and business teams. • Recommend database design, configuration, indexing, monitoring, security, and resiliency improvements to strengthen performance, reliability, security, and scalability. • Stay current with developments in database administration, SQL Server, Azure SQL, backup and recovery practices, automation, security, and enterprise compliance technologies. Compliance, Governance & Collaboration: • Follow established change management, release management, incident management, security, and governance practices for database platforms. • Adhere to the Company's Quality Management System (QMS) as well as domestic a