Database Administrator
Job Description
BotswanaPost seeks to deliver sustainable innovative business growth through people excellence and a commitment to provide exceptional customer experience whilst continuously building a high-performance and people-centered company that is fit to serve and fit to grow. The company invites suitably qualified, innovative, results-orientated, resilient and self-driven individuals to apply for the positions described below and join a team of professionals to drive service excellence; DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR – BPS 33/2/1 VOL.1 (59)
Key Responsibilities
- Install, configure, upgrade and administer SQL, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse and other database platforms across sandbox, development, test and production environments.
- Design and maintain high-availability, replication, clustering and connection-pooling configurations to meet availability targets for transactional and analytical workloads.
- Perform proactive capacity planning, storage management and version lifecycle management so that platforms remain supported, patched and sized for growth.
- Automate provisioning, configuration and routine operations using scripting and infrastructure-as-code tooling.
- Maintain accurate, current documentation of database architecture, configurations, standards, runbooks and procedures.
- Implement and operate monitoring, alerting and observability for database health, query performance, replication lag, storage and security events.
- Analyse and tune queries, indexes, schemas, partitioning and configuration to meet transaction and reporting SLAs, working with developers to design efficient data models.
- Establish performance baselines and produce regular capacity and performance reports.
- Design, schedule and verify backup regimes, including point-in-time recovery, in line with defined RTO/RPO and data retention requirements.
- Own the database components of the Active-Passive disaster recovery architecture, including replication to the DR site, failover and failback procedures and periodic DR testing with documented evidence.
- Lead database incident response and root-cause analysis, restoring service within agreed service levels and escalating as required.
- Administer database access on least-privilege and segregation-of-duties principles, including privileged-access management and periodic access reviews.
- Implement encryption at rest and in transit, data masking for non-production environments, audit logging and integrity controls in line with the Data Protection Act, Bank of Botswana, BOCRA and NBFIRA requirements and internal policy.
- Apply security patches and hardening baselines promptly; remediate vulnerability findings and support penetration testing of data platforms.
- Produce audit evidence and respond to internal audit, external audit and regulatory inspection requests concerning data management controls.
- Design and build the database layer for transformation initiatives, including the digital wallet, pension disbursement and eMoney interoperability programmes.
- Participate in vendor and platform evaluations, providing technical assessment of database architecture, data migration, integration and licensing implications.
- Plan and execute data migrations, schema changes and releases through formal change management, working within DevOps/DataOps pipelines alongside development and integration teams.
- Enable analytics and reporting by maintaining well-governed analytical data structures and supporting data integration, APIs and regulatory reporting extracts.
- Provide third-line database support to application, integration, analytics and infrastructure teams and to business systems owners.
- Manage database-related engagements with software vendors, technical support providers and managed service partners, holding them to contracted service levels.
- Mentor IT colleagues on database practices and build in-house capability to reduce key-person dependency on the role.
Qualifications & Experience
- A degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems or a related field.
- A minimum of five (5) years’ experience as a database administrator or database engineer, of which at least two (2) years in a financial services, banking or other regulated, high-availability environment.
- Deep, current expertise in SQL and PostgreSQL administration (replication, high availability, performance tuning, backup and point-in-time recovery); working knowledge of analytical/columnar databases such as ClickHouse is a strong advantage.
- Experience with a legacy or commercial database (e.g. Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL/MariaDB) and with database migration between platforms.
- Proficiency in Linux administration and in scripting/automation (e.g. Bash, Python, Ansible or Terraform); experience with virtualised environments such as Proxmox VE or VMware.
- Proven experience implementing database security controls: privileged-access management, encryption, auditing, data masking and segregation of duties.
- Knowledge of data protection and financial-sector regulatory requirements (Data Protection Act, Bank of Botswana and NBFIRA guidelines) and of ITIL change, incident and problem management.
- Experience with monitoring/observability tooling, CI/CD or DataOps pipelines and container platforms is an advantage.
- Relevant certification (e.g. PostgreSQL Professional, Oracle OCP, Microsoft Azure Database Administrator, ITIL Foundation) is an advantage.
- Strong Analytical, problem-solving and documentation skills; ability to explain technical risk clearly to non-technical stakeholders; high integrity given the sensitivity of data handled.
How to Apply
Apply by email: recruitment@botswanapost.co.bw REF Code: BPS 33/2/1 VOL.1 (59) Please state that you got the job advert through JobHub BW website when submitting your application.
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