[Hiring] Database Consultant @Pythian

Role Description

The Database Consultant plays a critical role in our CockroachDB consulting practice in the following key areas of responsibility:

• Own the reliability, scalability, latency, and performance of mission-critical CockroachDB infrastructure.
• Promote operational efficiency by developing automated systems and tools, significantly reducing operational toil.
• Act as a technical mentor and subject matter expert within the team and consulting partner to customer teams.

What you will be doing

• Serve as a primary technical consultant, partnering with customer teams for project-based and long-term CockroachDB support.
• Design, document, and implement the new L1/L2 support channel and operational workflow (e.g., ticket triage, escalation paths, SLA adherence) for CockroachDB to accommodate evolving client expectations.
• Act as an escalation point for complex, time-sensitive production support and troubleshooting within distributed database environments.
• Ensure data security, integrity, and quality by adhering to internal standards and industry best practices, covering TLS/certificate management, RBAC, secrets management (KMS/CMEK/encryption), and audit logging.
• Own Backup, Restore, and Disaster Recovery (DR) operations, including scheduled full/incremental backups, point-in-time restore, restore drills, RPO/RTO definition, and failover testing.
• Manage the full CockroachDB Cluster Lifecycle, including node add/remove/decommissioning, rolling upgrades, patch validation, capacity planning, and downgrade/rollback planning.
• Develop readable, reusable code to streamline provisioning, management, and monitoring of CockroachDB clusters.
• Collaborate with development teams to define and implement relevant observability metrics, with the goal of enhancing application reliability.
• Direct incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem processes for critical database outages.
• Create and maintain clear documentation, runbooks, and operational guides to reduce business risk and operational costs.
• Define the technical strategy and roadmap for CockroachDB adoption and management across customer engagements.
• Proactively manage technical debt and identify scaling bottlenecks, ensuring infrastructure remains robust for future growth.
• Achieve billable and effective utilization targets of 85%.
• Perform other duties as assigned by your Manager.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Database Administrator (DBA) or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).
• Advanced experience with CockroachDB and intermediate-level experience with a secondary relational database (e.g., PostgreSQL or MySQL).
• Proven experience migrating legacy databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) to a distributed SQL system like CockroachDB.
• Advanced SQL and Optimization Knowledge: Skilled in query tuning, schema/index design, identifying hotspots, managing transaction contention and retry errors, and using EXPLAIN ANALYZE/table statistics for diagnostics.
• Tool Stack: Terraform, AWS (High skill in networking for multi-region deployment), Vault, Gitlab, and deep production experience with Kubernetes/Helm/Operator.
• Deep scripting and automation skills (Python, Go, and Bash).
• Expertise in analyzing CockroachDB-specific observability metrics, including hands-on experience with Prometheus/Grafana/Alertmanager, Datadog or CloudWatch, DB Console, and SLO/SLI reporting.
• Excellent customer service and consulting focus with proven ability to manage client expectations and priorities.
• Exceptional logical and systematic analysis for systematic problem-solving and root cause analysis.
• A proactive individual with the ability to identify process gaps and enhance improvements across systems and structures.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills for delivering technical and strategic information to diverse audiences.

Benefits

• Competitive total rewards package.
• Flexibly work remotely from your home; all you need is a stable internet connection.
• Collaborate with some of the best and brightest in the industry.
• Substantial training allowance; participate in professional development days, attend training, become certified, whatever you like!
• All the equipment you need to work from home including a laptop with your choice of OS, and an annual budget to personalize your work environment.
• Annual wellness budget to prioritize your health and well-being.
• Generous amount of paid vacation and sick days, as well as a day off to volunteer for your favorite charity.