Our client, a leading South African online retailer, is looking for a highly talented Database Team Lead to lead the Database Engineering team in Cape Town.
The Database Team is focused on supporting, maintaining, and improving all things database. We operate a number of open source database systems, from Relational Databases, to Graph Databases and NoSQL. The team maintains the infrastructure, applications, and looks after the data, ensuring that we maintain high levels of uptime, and support the growing environment. The compnay is growing quickly, which brings a number of unique and interesting challenges. Data is growing quickly within the organization, and there is a lot of opportunity to shape the tools, technologies, and culture of data in the company.
This position reports to the Engineering Director
Your responsibilities will include:
– Architecting and implementing technical solutions to support scale and security initiatives
– Operational work, ensuring databases are operating smoothly, creating databases, users, tables, schema changes, bulk data changes, etc.
– Maintenance and hygiene for longevity, attending to upgrades, ensuring backups are happening and healthy, capacity planning and forecasting
– Automation of repetitive tasks through scripting or code
– Mentoring and coaching of data best practices within the organization. Driving the adoption of these best practices to ensure data hygiene.
– Implementing features, technology, and processes that move us towards industry best practices, improving on scalability, efficiency, reliability, and security
– Responding to Incidents
Attributes required
– Works well with people, and is passionate about helping people be their best
– Is a team player, an active listener, mentor, and able to communicate well
– Shows solid reasoning and decision making, with the ability to work under pressure
– Is passionate about technology, systems and data
– Is curious, always learning, and keeping up to date with the industry
– Has a deep understanding of database engines
– Has a solid grasp on query performance analysis and schema design
– Can troubleshoot complex database operations and performance issues
– Can automate tasks using shell scripting or writing small applications
Qualifications/Experience:
– Comp-sci Degree or 5 to 10 years relevant industry experience
– Experience with open source relational database systems (MySQL, PostgreSQL)
– Experience in Linux administration (Processes, Networking, Disks, Security)
– Experience leading a team technically, with a focus on a very high quality output
– Experience mentoring, coaching, and developing others technically
– Experience working within an Agile team, and an advocate of that culture
– Significant technical experience and a proven track record of database schema design, and query optimization
– A thorough understanding of database principles
– Write code (we use Python)
– A solid understanding of Networking (TCP, UDP, IP, nmap, wireshark, etc)
– Experience with a configuration management system (Puppet, Chef, Ansible)
– Experience with Kafka, PubSub, or other event-based systems
– Experience with Cassandra, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and other database systems
– Experience with Data warehousing, data lakes, lambda/kappa architectures
The Environment:
– Employees are entrepreneurial and dynamic, smart, customer- centric, fun and have the shared ambition of the company being the leading e- commerce company in Africa.
– We have fun, work hard, take ownership, work in teams to create solutions, and are always open to direct feedback/new ideas on where we can improve.
– We are short on ego and high on output.
– We are doers and not only thinkers, it’s all in the execution after all.
– We love what we do and what we are creating.
Personal Attributes:
We seek people who are:
– Experts at DOING, they can not only design but also execute
– Analytical, able to use data to make decisions. Letting data decide but not consume
– Although innovation is important, GREAT requires a lot of work. This does not happen only during business hours
– Always questioning the status quo
– Not averse to risk
– Business smart. Able to think about problems from a business perspective using technical and product input
– Self-directed, taking action based on own initiative
– Collaborative
– Thorough
– User focused, always trying to understand a product from the users perspective
– Able to communicate clearly and not afraid to voice an opinion, no matter how unpopular
General:
– Our client is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We encourage applicants from the previously disadvantaged groups and people with disabilities, to apply.
– While we would really like to respond to every application, should you not be contacted for this position within 15 days please consider your application as unsuccessful.
– Please include your current salary and salary expectations.