Senior SQL Database Administrator

At Zelis, we Get Stuff Done. So, let’s get to it!

A Little About Us

Zelis is modernizing the healthcare financial experience across payers, providers, and healthcare consumers. We serve more than 750 payers, including the top five national health plans, regional health plans, TPAs and millions of healthcare providers and consumers across our platform of solutions. Zelis sees across the system to identify, optimize, and solve problems holistically with technology built by healthcare experts – driving real, measurable results for clients.

At Zelis, AI is woven into the fabric of how we work. Every associate is expected - and empowered - to partner with AI to challenge the status quo, accelerate innovation, and amplify their impact. This is a place for builders with a growth mindset who act with agility, embrace change, and use modern technology to shape smarter solutions, exceptional experiences, and the future of our industry for our clients, customers, and our culture.

A Little About You

You bring a unique blend of personality and professional expertise to your work, inspiring others with your passion and dedication. Your career is a testament to your diverse experiences, community involvement, and the valuable lessons you've learned along the way. You are more than just your resume; you are a reflection of your achievements, the knowledge you've gained, and the personal interests that shape who you are.

Position Overview This role is responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing complex database environments to ensure security, integrity, and high availability. This role provides advanced support for mission-critical systems, leads performance tuning initiatives, and contributes to strategic improvements in database architecture. This role operates with minimal supervision and collaborates across teams to deliver scalable and reliable solutions.

The Senior Database Engineer at Zelis is a hands-on technical role responsible for the engineering, administration, performance, modernization, and operational reliability of enterprise database platforms across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and on-premises environments. This role supports business-critical databases with a focus on performance, availability, monitoring, incident response, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, maintenance, upgrades, migrations, and lifecycle management. A key priority is modernizing the Zelis database estate, including migrating and re-platforming applications from Microsoft SQL Server to strategic platforms such as PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. The Senior Database Engineer will work directly with application and engineering teams to assess schemas, queries, stored procedures, dependencies, and data access patterns and execute the technical work required to migrate, optimize, and operate these workloads. This position requires deep hands-on database engineering and DBA expertise, strong production troubleshooting skills, and experience with cloud database technologies, automation, monitoring, and Infrastructure as Code.

As a Senior Database Engineer at Zelis, you will be responsible for the hands-on engineering, administration, performance, modernization, and operational support of enterprise database platforms across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and on-premises environments. This role is focused on the day-to-day engineering and operation of business-critical databases, including database performance, availability, monitoring, incident response, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, maintenance, upgrades, migrations, and lifecycle management.

A primary focus of this role over the next two to three years will be the hands-on migration and re-platforming of applications away from Microsoft SQL Server where appropriate, with an emphasis on PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. You will work directly with application and engineering teams to analyze existing databases, schemas, queries, stored procedures, and data access patterns and perform the technical work required to migrate and optimize workloads on strategic database platforms.

This position requires strong hands-on DBA and database engineering skills and the ability to troubleshoot and resolve database issues in production environments. You will spend the majority of your time working directly with database platforms, SQL, automation, monitoring, Infrastructure as Code, migrations, performance tuning, and operational tooling.

Key Responsibilities:

· Engineer, administer, maintain, and support enterprise database platforms across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments, including Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, SQL Server on Amazon EC2, Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.

· Perform hands-on database performance engineering, including query tuning, execution plan analysis, schema tuning, index design and optimization, statistics maintenance and analysis, stored procedure optimization, database configuration, and analysis of application data access patterns.

· Troubleshoot and resolve production database issues involving performance degradation, blocking, deadlocks, locking, resource contention, CPU, memory, storage, connectivity, capacity, availability, and database configuration.

· Perform hands-on migration and re-platforming of databases and applications from Microsoft SQL Server to PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, and other strategic database platforms.

· Execute database migration activities including discovery, compatibility assessment, schema conversion, data migration, remediation, testing, performance validation, cutover, rollback, and post-migration optimization.

· Install, configure, patch, upgrade, and maintain SQL Server and PostgreSQL database environments while ensuring database platforms remain current, supportable, secure, and compliant with established standards.

· Configure, maintain, test, and troubleshoot database high availability, backup and restore, disaster recovery, replication, resiliency, and recovery capabilities.

· Implement and maintain database telemetry, observability, monitoring, and alerting using IDERA, AWS-native monitoring capabilities, and other database monitoring tools.

· Analyze database telemetry and performance data to proactively identify query performance problems, capacity constraints, resource contention, configuration issues, and emerging operational risks.

· Participate in 24x7 production support and on-call rotations, responding to database incidents, troubleshooting problems, restoring service, performing root cause analysis, and implementing corrective actions.

· Develop and maintain automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for database provisioning, configuration, deployment, maintenance, monitoring, patching, upgrades, and other repeatable database engineering activities.

· Use Git, GitHub, CI/CD, VS Code or other IDEs, peer review, and version control to develop and maintain database scripts, SQL code, automation, Infrastructure as Code, and engineering assets.

· Use AI-assisted engineering tools