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, SQL proficiency, and experience with high-traffic website architectures. The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with a competitive salary and benefits package. Travel is expected 1-2 times per year.

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

• Implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting of relational database systems in production and staging environments
• Handling database version upgrades, testing and working with upstream on bug identification and resolution
• Configuring replication, designing schema optimizations and running schema changes
• Monitoring, debugging and improving query performance
• Improving observability (alerting, metrics, monitoring) of database infrastructure
• Multi-datacenter replication topology design, capacity and infrastructure planning
• Taking part in incident response, diagnosis and follow-up on system outages or alerts across Wikimedia’s production infrastructure and participating in an on call rotation
• Sharing 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

Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$ 109,047 to US$ 169,455 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location