Safaricom, the leading provider of converged communication solutions in Kenya (Telephony, Broadband Internet, and Financial services), is seeking a highly skilled Database Administrator.
This role involves managing the full lifecycle of large-scale database environments, ensuring high availability (99.99%), stringent security, and optimal performance across open-source and enterprise platforms, including cloud deployments. The successful candidate will be crucial for implementing business continuity solutions, driving automation efforts, and modernizing database infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Manage the full database lifecycle, including installation, configuration, backup/recovery, updates and/or upgrades, automation, and maintenance.
- Ensure 99.99% availability maintained for all critical databases.
- Ensure tickets raised are responded to within the agreed SLA.
- Test Business Continuity (BCP) and High Availability (HA) solutions for critical systems to minimize downtime during maintenance and failures.
- Optimize database performance through tuning, query optimization, indexing, and system resource management.
- Ensure databases comply with security best practices and data integrity standards.
- Ensure regular reviews on information lifecycle management policies is conducted.
- Ensure optimal performance of all systems maintained conforming to the SLA agreements between business and Quality Assurance.
- Implement open-source databases as an alternative to existing proprietary solutions.
- Collaborate with developers, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to improve database efficiency and reliability.
- Automate database administration tasks using scripts and other automation tools.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in a related technical field and more than four years of hands-on administration of large-scale database environments across open-source and enterprise platforms.
- Proficiency in at least three major RDBMS and two NoSQL technologies (e.g., PostgreSQL, GaussDB, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Cassandra, Redis, MongoDB), with strong capabilities in performance tuning, troubleshooting, migrations, ILM, replication, clustering, sharding, and high-availability.
- Extensive experience managing databases on Linux/Unix and Windows, administering PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and MongoDB across development, test, staging, and production environments, including cloud deployments (AWS RDS) and on-premises setups.
- Skilled in designing conceptual, logical, and physical data models; optimizing data movement and integrity; and automating administrative tasks using Bash, Python, or Ansible.
- Hands-on expertise with AWS-hosted PostgreSQL, high-availability architectures, replication, encryption, disaster recovery solutions, and scalable, secure cloud database operations.
- Holds or can hold certifications across major database platforms (PostgreSQL, GaussDB, MySQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, SQL Server), cloud certification (AWS), and OS certifications (LPIC, RHCE), with desirable exposure to big data technologies (Hadoop, Spark), event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and data analysis or machine learning methods.
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