Staff Database Administrator

📋 Description

• • Own the health, performance and structural integrity of the relational databases that power Wikipedia and its sister projects—systems that serve hundreds of millions of users every day.
• • Architect, deploy and maintain MariaDB and MySQL-derivative clusters across production, staging and development environments, ensuring 99.9 %+ availability for one of the top-ten web properties on Earth.
• • Design and operate multi-site replication topologies that span continents, balancing read/write load, automatic failover and disaster-recovery requirements while keeping latency imperceptible to editors and readers.
• • Partner with software engineers, data analysts and product teams to review and optimize SQL schemas, queries and indexing strategies, translating complex product requirements into scalable, performant data models.
• • Plan and execute zero-downtime schema migrations and version upgrades on tables that can exceed billions of rows, using online DDL tools, blue-green deployments and rigorous pre-production testing.
• • Build and refine observability layers—custom Prometheus exporters, Grafana dashboards and alertmanager rules—that give engineers real-time insight into query latency, replication lag, buffer-pool efficiency and hardware saturation.
• • Forecast capacity needs 6–18 months ahead, translating traffic growth and feature roadmaps into hardware specs, cloud budgets and procurement timelines for both bare-metal and virtualized infrastructure.
• • Automate repetitive operational tasks with Python, Go or Bash, integrating with Puppet, Ansible and Kubernetes to turn manual runbooks into self-healing, auditable workflows.
• • Participate in a 24×7 on-call rotation shared across the SRE Data Persistence team, responding to incidents, conducting blameless post-mortems and driving systemic fixes that prevent recurrence.
• • Contribute upstream to open-source projects such as MariaDB, Percona Toolkit and Orchestrator, ensuring the Foundation remains a good citizen of the communities that underpin its stack.
• • Mentor junior DBAs and SREs through pairing, code reviews and internal tech talks, cultivating a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing.
• • Champion data privacy and security best practices—encryption at rest, TLS in transit, role-based access control and GDPR-compliant data retention—so that every byte of the world’s knowledge remains safe and trustworthy.
• • Collaborate with the larger Site Reliability Engineering organization to align database standards with platform-wide objectives for observability, CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• • Influence the technical roadmap by presenting performance benchmarks, cost analyses and risk assessments to senior leadership, ensuring that database investments keep pace with Wikimedia’s mission to disseminate free knowledge indefinitely.