DBA Lead

Are you passionate about leading database platforms that power critical business solutions and drive operational excellence?

Do you enjoy mentoring technical teams, shaping database strategy, and solving complex infrastructure challenges in a collaborative environment?

About the Business

LexisNexis Risk Solutions is the essential partner in the assessment of risk. Within our Insurance vertical, we provide customers with solutions and decision tools that combine public and industry specific content with advanced technology and analytics to assist them in evaluating and predicting risk and enhancing operational efficiency. Our insurance risk solutions help drive better data-driven decisions across the insurance policy lifecycle, all while reducing risk. You can learn more about LexisNexis Risk at

https://risk.lexisnexis.com/insurance

About our Team

The Database Administration team provides enterprise-wide support for mission-critical database platforms, ensuring high availability, performance, security, and operational stability. The team manages MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and cloud database technologies across hybrid environments while driving automation, observability, disaster recovery readiness, and continuous improvement initiatives. Working closely with engineering, infrastructure, security, and DevOps teams, DBAs play a key role in delivering resilient and scalable data services that power business-critical applications.

About the Role

This candidate works with team on daily activities involving the design, management, maintenance, and utilization of databases. Provide leadership and drive strategy, standards, and processes for applicable database environments.

Responsibilities

• Ensure the maintenance, stability, and operational health of all databases and related technologies.
• Mitigate customer-impacting issues and support product and infrastructure releases according to development plans and schedules.
• Provide strategic direction for hosted database architectures and assess the impact of hosted product requirements.
• Lead research into new or alternative technologies and recommend upgrades or changes to database infrastructure.
• Review, implement, and sign off on enhancements, upgrades, and changes to systems, procedures, and back-office infrastructure environments.
• Provide technical leadership and mentoring to Database Administrators on complex database design, infrastructure, and maintenance topics.
• Engage with Technical Architects and senior Development team members to provide technical designs and guidance to the Database Operations team.
• Take responsibility for the implications and impact of technical design decisions.
• Resolve performance issues and support root cause resolution.
• Perform thorough impact analysis for assigned database infrastructure activities and understand their effect on business operations.
• Respond to issues and support calls in accordance with relevant procedures, including security requirements.
• Install, upgrade, test, and monitor new database infrastructure and equipment.
• Monitor database operations and support maintenance activities efficiently to minimize issues and incidents.
• Ensure clear and timely communication with the line manager and relevant stakeholders regarding progress, issues, and risks.
• Perform all other duties as assigned.

Leadership and People Management

• Assign personnel to projects and direct their activities to meet business and technology objectives.
• Review and evaluate work, prepare performance reports, and support employee development.
• Project long-range requirements for database administration in collaboration with technology and business leaders.
• Carry out management responsibilities in accordance with organizational policies, procedures, and applicable laws, including interviewing, hiring, training, planning, assigning work, appraising performance, rewarding and disciplining employees, and resolving complaints or concerns.
• Ensure staff have the training, resources, feedback, and coaching needed to consistently meet or exceed individual and team performance goals.
• Encourage new ideas from staff to foster continuous improvement and innovation.
• Empower staff to be accountable and responsible for their actions and decisions., Database Reliability Engineering
• Own and improve the reliability, availability, scalability, and performance of production database services.
• Design and support highly available, multi-region database architectures.
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
• Define and support operational reliability standards and best practices.

Database Administration & Operations

• Support database management systems and all related software platforms.
• Design, build, and maintain database environments across development, testing, staging, and production.
• Provide technical support and database administration for mission-critical systems.
• Perform database upgrades, maintenance, patching, and lifecycle management.
• Conduct performance tuning, query optimization, and capacity planning activities.

Automation & Cloud Enablement

• Build and maintain Infrastructure as Code solutions.
• Develop automation to eliminate repetitive operational tasks.
• Support CI/CD integration and database deployment modernization.
• Partner with software engineering teams to improve database reliability and deployment processes.
• Drive cloud migration and modernization initiatives.

Observability & Incident Response

• Implement monitoring, alerting, dashboards, and operational runbooks.
• Participate in on-call support and incident response activities.
• Lead root cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
• Continuously improve operational readiness and platform resilience.

• 7+ years of database administration experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent experience required.
• Demonstrated experience leading, mentoring, or managing technical teams.

Technical Skills

• Strong understanding of database infrastructure, administration, maintenance, design, and related technologies.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot database connectivity, infrastructure, and performance issues across multiple operating environments.
• Ability to perform root cause analysis and impact analysis for database-related issues.
• Experience installing, upgrading, testing, and monitoring database infrastructure and equipment.
• Ability to research, evaluate, and recommend new or alternative database technologies.
• Strong problem-solving, organizational, project planning, time management, change management, and delegation skills.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to present concise and effective information to senior leadership, customers, and cross-functional teams.
• Strong interpersonal, mentoring, customer service, and presentation skills.
• Ability to set, communicate, implement, and achieve business objectives through the direct management of others.

Additional Skills:

Database Technologies

• 7+ years of MySQL DBA or Database Engineering experience.
• Strong experience with MySQL replication design, implementation, and support.
• Experience with High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) architectures.
• Extensive experience with backup and recovery technologies including Percona XtraBackup and snapshot-based recovery solutions.
• Experience performing MySQL patching, upgrades, and major version migrations.
• Strong query optimization, performance tuning, and capacity management experience.
• Database security administration and governance experience.

Additional Database Technologies (Preferred)

• Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Oracle

Modern Engineering Competencies

• Cloud-native architecture principles
• Platform engineering and self-service automation.
• AI-assisted operations and engineering productivity tools.
• Automated testing and deployment strategies.
• Continuous improvement mindset and operational excellence focus.

Cloud Engineering

• Strong experience supporting cloud-hosted database services in Azure and/or AWS
• Experience with: Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server, Azure Managed Database Services, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora
• Knowledge of multi-zone and multi-region deployment strategies

DevOps & Platform Engineering

• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and/or Terragrunt
• CI/CD pipeline implementation using GitHub Actions
• Git-centric development workflows
• Automation experience using: Python, Bash/Shell Scripting, Ansible

Observability & Reliability Engineering

• Experience with enterprise monitoring and observability platforms including
• Grafana/Datadog/ELK
• Azure Monitor
• CloudWatch
• Understanding of SRE concepts including:
• Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs)
• Error Budgets
• Incident Management
• Root Cause Analysis
• Blameless Post-mortems

• Learn more about the LexisNexis Risk team and how we work https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/RiskSolutions/page/21c296c982531000b79663f3194b0000

U.S. National Base Pay Range: $115,400 - $192,300. Geographic differentials may apply in some locations to better reflect local market rates.

Base Pay Range for CO is $115,400 - $192,300. Base Pay Range for IL is $121,200 - $201,900. Base Pay Range for Chicago, IL is $126,900 - $211,500. Base Pay Range for MD is $121,200 - $201,900. Base Pay Range for NY is $126,900 - $211,500. Base Pay Range for New York City is $138,400 - $230,700. Base Pay Range for Rochester, NY is $115,400 - $192,300. Base Pay Range for OH is $109,500 - $182,700. Base Pay Range for NJ is $136,213- $217,587.