Remita is a foundational player in the Nigerian payments and fintech ecosystem, processing a significant part of the country’s transaction volumes. We help individuals, organizations, and governments to receive and make payments easily.
We are recruiting to fill the position below:
Job Title: Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator (DBA)
Location: Lagos
Employment Type: Full-time (Hybrid)
Role Overview
- We are seeking an experienced and technically deep Senior PostgreSQL Database Administrator to join our Database Engineering team.
- In this role, you will be the primary custodian of our high-volume, mission-critical PostgreSQL databases, ensuring the availability, integrity, performance, and security of data infrastructure that processes millions of financial transactions every day.
- You will work closely with software engineers, DevOps / platform engineers, security teams, and business stakeholders to maintain an enterprise-grade database environment with zero tolerance for downtime or data loss.
Key Responsibilities
Database Administration & Operations:
- Manage, monitor, and maintain multiple high-transactional PostgreSQL database clusters in production, staging, and development environments.
- Oversee day-to-day DBA operations including database provisioning, schema management, user access control, and tablespace management.
- Implement and enforce database change management processes (DDL reviews, migration scripts, rollback strategies).
- Ensure 99.99% database availability through proactive monitoring, alerting, and rapid incident response.
- Manage database patching, upgrades, and version migrations with minimal service disruption.
Performance Tuning & Optimization:
- Continuously analyse and optimize query execution plans, indexing strategies, and table structures to sustain high throughput under peak transaction loads.
- Perform capacity planning and resource forecasting to ensure database infrastructure scales ahead of business growth.
- Tune PostgreSQL configuration parameters (memory, connection pooling, WAL settings, autovacuum, checkpoints) for optimal performance.
- Partner with development teams on query design, ORM usage, and schema reviews to prevent performance regressions before they reach production.
- Implement and manage connection pooling solutions (PgBouncer, Pgpool-II) to support high-concurrency workloads.
High Availability & Disaster Recovery:
- Design, implement, and maintain HA architectures including streaming replication, logical replication, and failover clusters (e.g., Patroni, Repmgr).
- Develop, test, and maintain disaster recovery (DR) plans with defined and validated RTO and RPO targets consistent with fintech regulatory standards.
- Manage and automate backup strategies (physical, logical, PITR) using tools such as pg_basebackup, pgBackRest, or Barman; ensure backups are regularly tested and restorable.
- Coordinate with infrastructure teams on multi-region and multi-AZ deployments for geo-redundancy.
Security & Compliance:
- Enforce the principle of least privilege across all database roles and service accounts.
- Implement database activity monitoring, auditing, and alerting to detect and respond to anomalous access patterns or policy violations.
- Ensure compliance with CBN data governance directives, PCI-DSS, NDPR, and internal data security policies.
- Manage encryption at rest and in transit for all database environments.
- Collaborate with the security team on vulnerability assessments, pen test remediation, and security hardening of PostgreSQL instances.
Automation & DevOps Integration:
- Develop and maintain automation scripts for routine DBA tasks using Python, Bash, or Ansible.
- Integrate database provisioning and schema migration workflows into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., using Flyway, Liquibase, or custom tooling).
- Manage infrastructure-as-code definitions for database resources deployed on cloud (AWS RDS/Aurora PostgreSQL, GCP Cloud SQL) or on-premises.
- Build and maintain comprehensive monitoring dashboards and alerting using tools such as Prometheus, pgBadger, or Grafana.
Collaboration & Leadership
- Serve as the technical authority on PostgreSQL within the engineering organisation; provide guidance and mentorship to mid-level and junior DBAs.
- Collaborate with software engineers on data modelling, schema design, and database best practices from the earliest stages of product development.
- Participate in architecture reviews and technical design discussions involving data storage, access patterns, and scalability.
- Produce and maintain clear, thorough documentation for database architecture and standard operating procedures.
- Participate in supporting production database incidents, acting as the escalation point for critical database issues.
Required Qualifications & Experience
- Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a closely related field.
- Minimum of 8 years of hands-on PostgreSQL DBA experience, with at least 3 years in a high-transaction-volume, enterprise production environment.
- Demonstrable experience managing PostgreSQL databases supporting financial services, payments, banking, or similarly regulated, high-stakes industries.
- Deep expertise in PostgreSQL internals: MVCC, WAL, VACUUM, query planner, locking mechanisms, and extension ecosystem.
- Proven track record designing and operating HA and DR architectures with streaming replication, Patroni, or equivalent tooling.
- Strong proficiency in performance tuning: EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE, index design (B-tree, GIN, BRIN, partial indexes), partition strategies, and statistics management.
- Solid experience with backup and recovery solutions: pgBackRest, Barman, pg_basebackup, and PITR workflows.
- Proficiency in scripting and automation (Python and/or Bash); experience integrating database tasks into CI/CD pipelines.
- Familiarity with containerisation and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, and running PostgreSQL in containerised or cloud-native environments.
- Experience with monitoring and observability stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, pgBadger, or equivalent.
- Working knowledge of PgBouncer or Pgpool-II for connection pooling at scale.
- Experience with data migration projects involving large-scale PostgreSQL databases (multi-TB or higher).
- Familiarity with Citus (distributed PostgreSQL), Timescale, or other PostgreSQL extensions for scalability.
Core Competencies:
- Technical Excellence: Exceptional depth in PostgreSQL and surrounding ecosystem; stays current with PostgreSQL releases and community developments.
- Problem Solving: Calm, methodical, and effective under pressure — especially during production incidents.
- Ownership Mindset: Takes full accountability for database health and acts proactively rather than reactively.
- Collaboration: Builds strong working relationships across engineering, product, and operations teams.
- Communication: Able to translate complex database concepts clearly for both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Security Consciousness: Treats data security and regulatory compliance as non-negotiable priorities.
What We Offer
- Competitive compensation, benefits, and professional development.
- Opportunity to contribute to shaping an impactful payment platforms in Africa.
- Access to modern tooling, cloud infrastructure, and a high-calibre engineering team.
- Hybrid working arrangement with a collaborative, inclusive culture.
- Comprehensive HMO and wellness benefits.
Application Closing Date
Not Specified.
https://www.hotnigerianjobs.com/hotjobs/904242/senior-postgresql-database-administrator-dba-at-re.html