Database Administrator (Postgres, Observability & DBaaS) - (NPW)

This role is the hands-on subject-matter expert for database observability and PostgreSQL within GIC's database engineering function. The incumbent runs and improves the day-to-day operational estate — instrumenting it, automating it, and operating databases as a managed service — while supporting the wider migration toward cloud and modern database platforms. This is a delivery-focused engineering role rather than an architecture role.

Key Responsibilities

Database operations and administration

• Administer, tune and support PostgreSQL across production and non-production environments, including installation, upgrade, patching, backup and recovery.
• Operate and support the wider estate alongside the platform team, with working depth in Oracle and MSSQL where required.
• Manage cloud-hosted and managed database services (AWS RDS/Aurora or equivalent), applying cloud-native operating patterns.
• Deliver and operate database-as-a-service capability — provisioning, lifecycle management, standard templates and self-service consumption models.
• Perform capacity planning, performance diagnostics, query tuning and root-cause analysis on production incidents.

Observability and automation

• Act as SME for database observability: instrument the estate end to end using Datadog, Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) and equivalent platforms.
• Build and maintain dashboards, alerting, SLIs and error budgets that give engineering and application teams a real view of database health.
• Automate routine administration, provisioning and configuration change using Python and Ansible.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines for database change, with GitHub-based source control.
• Reduce manual toil by converting recurring operational tasks into repeatable, tested automation.

Security, compliance and service management

• Apply enterprise information security standards to database components — hardening, access control, encryption and vulnerability patching.
• Maintain runbooks, DR procedures and operational documentation to an audit-ready standard.
• Handle incident, change and request management through ServiceNow, within agreed SLAs.

Essential Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 8+ years hands-on database administration in a large enterprise, with strong PostgreSQL depth; financial services exposure preferred.
• Demonstrable expertise in database observability tooling — Datadog, OEM, Grafana or equivalent.
• Working knowledge of cloud database services and managed-database operating models on AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Automation capability in Python and Ansible; SQL and Shell scripting.
• Linux/Unix administration proficiency, with a working understanding of networking and storage.
• Experience supporting change and incident management through ServiceNow.
• Strong troubleshooting discipline and clear written communication.

Desirable

• Exposure to Oracle (RAC, Data Guard) and MSSQL Always On.
• Familiarity with modern database and lakehouse platforms — Databricks, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra.
• Terraform or other Infrastructure-as-Code experience.
• Public cloud or PostgreSQL certification.