Principal Database Administrator

Compensation

Compensation includes a base salary in the range of $178,200.00 - $297,000.00. The base salary may vary within the anticipated base pay range based on factors such as the ultimate location of the position and the selected candidate's knowledge, skills, and abilities. Position may be eligible for additional compensation that may include an incentive program.

About the role

The Principal Database Administrator will support multiple product teams across Dealer Solutions and play a key role in working on (managed and optimized enterprise database systems) cloud migration initiatives.This role will be responsible for managing, optimizing, and re-architecting the current on-premises database environment. As a key technical enabler of the organization's cloud strategy, the Senior Database Administrator will first stabilize and remediate the existing database infrastructure, then design and execute a safe, phased migration to AWS.

This position bridges the gap between the current aging, monolithic on-premises database environment running on on-prem infrastructure and a future-state scalable, cost-efficient, cloud-native database platform.

The ideal candidate is a technical leader who serves as the organization's primary database authority. They are responsible for defining database strategy, driving cloud modernization efforts, advising architects and software engineers on data architecture decisions, ensuring high availability and security of enterprise platforms, and leading complex migration, resiliency, and performance initiatives. They possess deep expertise across both traditional relational databases and modern cloud-native data platforms while influencing technical direction across multiple engineering teams.

Min Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related discipline with 10+ years of experience in database administration, database engineering, or related technical roles. The right candidate may also have a Master's degree with 8+ years of experience, a Ph.D. with 5+ years of experience, or 14+ years of directly related experience.
• Experience in database design, database code development, database administration, and systems engineering to build high-performance, fault-tolerant database systems and infrastructure for database-centric applications.
• 8+ years of experience d with multiple AWS RDS database technologies (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle) and NoSQL services such as DynamoDB, understanding trade-offs between AWS-managed variants.
• Experience supporting 24x7 production systems with strict SLAs and uptime requirements.
• Expertise in high-availability and disaster-recovery technologies (clustering, replication, failover, backup/restore strategies) to reduce risk and downtime across critical systems. Strong background in high-availability/disaster-recovery technologies (e.g., clustering, log shipping, GoldenGate, Always On, replica sets).
• Perform logical and physical database design, data modeling, performance management/monitoring architecting and building databases from business requirements through planning, testing, and production deployment.
• Provide expert-level leadership for Microsoft SQL Server environments, serving as the highest-level technical authority across database architecture, platform strategy, modernization, upgrades, migrations, cloud transformation, high availability, disaster recovery, replication, clustering, and backup/recovery ensuring resilient, scalable platforms with minimal business disruption and downtime.
• 8 years of performance tuning, indexing strategies, query optimization, and execution plan analysis.
• Drive innovation through implementation across functional teams, both internal and external, to meet business requirements.
• Ability to design and support solutions spanning relational databases and microservice architectures, selecting the right technology for the right workload.
• Strong collaboration with software engineers and architects on application and data architecture decisions, ensuring systems are built for scalability, resilience, and performance.
• Use of observability tools and operational intelligence platforms to proactively monitor database health and drive data-informed operational decisions.
• 8+ years Building and maturing CI/CD practices for database changes (schema migrations, deployment automation, version control, automated testing).
• Mentor database administrators, influence architects and developers, review complex technical designs, lead strategic initiatives, and define the long-term evolution of the database platform.
• Strong communication skills translating technical trade-offs for engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience working in Agile development environments (Scrum, Kanban, or similar), collaborating within sprint-based delivery cycles.

Drug Testing

To be employed in this role, you'll need to clear a pre-employment drug test. Cox Automotive does not currently administer a pre-employment drug test for marijuana for this position.

Benefits

The Company offers eligible employees the flexibility to take as much vacation with pay as they deem consistent with their duties, the company's needs, and its obligations; seven paid holidays throughout the calendar year; and up to 160 hours of paid wellness annually for their own wellness or that of family members. Employees are also eligible for additional paid time off in the form of bereavement leave, time off to vote, jury duty leave, volunteer time off, military leave, and parental leave.