Senior Database Administrator

Summary

Join the Wikimedia Foundation as a Senior Database Administrator and be part of a team ensuring the health, availability, and performance of our MariaDB database systems. You will troubleshoot issues, maintain databases, tune performance, manage high availability and replication, handle backups, and optimize systems. This role involves working with MariaDB and MySQL, including benchmarking and testing new builds. The position requires advanced experience in MariaDB or MySQL administration, strong Linux knowledge, and proficiency in SQL. The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with a competitive salary and benefits package.

Requirements

• Advanced level of experience with MariaDB or MySQL database administration as the primary production database as well as replication topologies at scale
• Knowledge of Linux and IO/data storage concepts, internals, and troubleshooting (we run Linux in production exclusively)
• Proficiency in SQL
• Experience with debugging query performance and schema design
• Experience with MySQL high availability and replication management tooling
• Experience with remotely managing bare-metal servers
• 5+ years experience in a hands-on DBA role as part of a team
• Experience with high traffic and highly available website architectures and operations
• Strong English language skills
• Ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment, as an effective part of a globally distributed team, including ticket tracking systems and asynchronous communication tools
• B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent work experience

Responsibilities

• Implement, maintain, and troubleshoot relational database systems in production and staging environments
• Handle database version upgrades, testing, and work with upstream on bug identification and resolution
• Configure replication, design schema optimizations, and run schema changes
• Monitor, debug, and improve query performance
• Improve observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
• Design multi-datacenter replication topology, capacity, and infrastructure planning
• Take part in incident response, diagnosis, and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure and participate in an on-call rotation
• Share our values and work in accordance with them

Preferred Qualifications

• Proficient at automation/programming/scripting skills
• Experience with LAMP stack technologies (PHP/HHVM, memcached/Redis) - MediaWiki experience is a definite plus
• Experience with advanced distributed storage and database systems (Swift, Ceph, Cassandra, etc.) is a big plus
• Experience in architecture, design, and implementation of persistent data storage & query infrastructure
• Strong track record of open source contributions is a major plus

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Remote-first organization