Database Designer

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Key Responsibilities:

As Database Designer (Engineering) you will be responsible for facilitating the development of the right future-state architecture and ensuring its effective adoption. They will spend the majority of their time making application changes to improve database performance, scalability and reliability and delivering foundational database solutions and best practices for our backend engineering teams. This role will also advocate and support the enterprise’s IT strategies, identify and analyze enterprise business drivers, analyze the current IT environment to detect critical deficiencies, recommend solutions for improvement and develop strategies aligning IT to the business. They must have significant business knowledge and have one or more areas of technical expertise in which they concentrate. These technical areas may include network, security, applications and systems software, data and Internet.

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:

Develops the enterprise-wide guidelines and standards for cataloging and maintaining data repositories.

Develops single source data strategy.

Maintains enterprise-wide integrity of the data model by ensuring that data design and transformation procedures are implemented and followed.

Participates in the design of the information architecture, across multiple data types. 

Participates in the development of a usable information architecture, which may include a data model, associated metamodel, common business vocabulary, ontologies and taxonomies, which will then be used to guide solution development and achieve consistency of information assets across the application portfolio.

Ensures regulatory issues are considered surrounding information assets (such as consumer privacy laws, data retention policies, outsourced data and specific industry guidelines are adhered to.

Facilitates the mapping and audit-ability of information assets.

Works closely with other functional area architects and security specialists to ensure adequate security solutions are in place throughout all IT systems and platforms to mitigate identified risks sufficiently, and to meet business objectives and regulatory requirements.

Develops the business, information and technical artifacts that constitute the enterprise information security architecture and solutions.

Researches, designs and advocates new technologies, architectures, and security products.

Analyzes business impact and exposure, based on emerging security threats, vulnerabilities and risks.

Communicates security risks and solutions to business partners and IT staff.

Assists in the development of solutions that deliver capabilities to the enterprise.

Analyzes enterprise business drivers to determine corresponding change requirements.

Assists in the implementation of an ESA based on enterprise business requirements and IT strategies.

Assists in defining the principles to guide solution decisions for the enterprise.

Coordinates solution architecture implementation and modification activities.

Assists in the evaluation and selection of software product standards, as well as the design of standard software configurations.

Consults with application or infrastructure development projects to fit systems or infrastructure to architecture.

Provides strategic consultation to assigned line-of-business (LOB) customers in defining or designing business processes, functions and organizational structures.

Keeps IT's technology and service managers aware of key LOB customer issues, identifying and resolving potential problems and conflicts.

Collaborates with other IT functional areas to remain apprised of project status, and inform LOB customer management of progress.

Facilitates agreement on organizational work models to meet business requirements.

Works collaboratively with business strategists, process owners and subject matter experts.

Leverages technology to enable or alter business processes or practices.

Assists in the definition of the principles that guide technology decisions for the enterprise.

Assists in the implementation of an Enterprise Technology Architecture (ETA) based on business requirements and IT strategies, as well as to rectify gaps and pain points within the current state.

Analyzes the current technology environment to detect critical deficiencies and recommend solutions for improvement.

Assesses the capacity and resource utilization of application and search tools, components, network, platform facilities, application/ integration/ database servers, storage, security and management hardware and software.

Approves and modifies the designs and architectures by reviewing end-user topology, security, performance, and interoperability requirements.

Consults on application or infrastructure development projects to fit systems or infrastructure to the technical architecture.

Participates in domain technical and business discussions relative to future architecture direction.

Aligns architectural strategy with business goals.

Assists in the analysis, design, and development of a roadmap and implementation plan based upon a current vs. future state in a cohesive architecture viewpoint. 

Works with Lead Architect to assure architectural alignment.

Gathers and analyzes data and develops requirements at project level.

Aligns architectural requirements with IT strategy.

Assesses near-term needs to establish business priorities.

Analyzes information to evaluate the effectiveness of controls, determine the accuracy of reports, and monitor the efficiency and security of operations.

Supports and participates in developing policies, standards, guidelines and procedures.

Designs standard software configurations.

Promotes the EA process, outcomes and results.

Participates in the EA and domain’s architecture Governance process.

Reviews exceptions and makes recommendations to architectural standards at a domain level.

Identifies opportunities for reuse.

Supports the development of architectural models or views.

Analyzes the current architecture to identify weaknesses and develop opportunities for improvements.

Identifies and when necessary, proposes variances to the architecture to accommodate project needs.

Consults with project teams to ensure compatibility with existing solutions, infrastructure and services.

Manages the design of systems.

Provides strategic consultation to clients and IT teams.

Participates in quality reviews and provides feedback.

Advises on options, risks, costs versus benefits, system impacts, and technology priorities.

Works with business leaders to understand business requirements and help them understand how technology tradeoffs influence strategy.

Consults on business-facing projects and maintains knowledge of their progress.

Keeps IT’s technology and service managers aware of key customer issues, identifying and resolving potential problems and conflicts.

Sells the architecture process, its outcome and ongoing results.

Coordinates architecture implementation and modification activities.

Assists in post-implementation continuous-improvement efforts to enhance performance and provide increased functionality.

Ensures the conceptual completeness of the technical solution.

Works closely with project management to ensure alignment of plans with what is being delivered.

Researches and evaluates emerging technology, industry and market trends to assist in project development and/or operational support activities.

Provides recommendations based on business relevance, appropriate timing and deployment.

Identifies the tools and components used for a project from the approved enterprise toolset.

Recommends expenditures based on the size, scope, and cost of hardware and software components.

Assists in developing business cases.

Recommends changes that impact strategic business direction.

Supports change management initiatives.

Collaborates with project management on reporting project status, issues, risks and benefits.

Meets with project leaders to ensure progress towards architectural alignment with project goals and requirements.

Develops, motivates, and directs staff to create a team environment.

Coaches and mentors team members.

Recommends training programs targeting specific areas of improvement.

QUALIFICATIONS:

Degree in Information Technology, Information Systems or equivalent discipline.

At least 7-10 years of relevant experience in Database design/operations .

Hands-on experience in designing/reviewing, developing/optimising/refactoring, and implementing new database schema/model  that meets the business requirement with optimized DB performance.

Specialized in  DB performance tuning, and DB infrastructure capacity / high availability planning for very large and critical database systems.

Subject matter expert on database technologies  such as MS SQL Server  and some other RDBMS MySQL, PostgreSQL.

Subject matter expert in  database designs  by recommending DB best practices to the application development team.

Experience in  building database projects for on-premise or cloud environments .

Able to  create complex functions, scripts, stored procedures and triggers  to support application development.

Provide database expertise to engineering teams through code reviews, pairing and training to help deliver optimal database designs and queries.

Create and maintain architecture and systems documentation.

Build and maintain data pipelines from internal and external databases and SaaS applications.

Good-to-have:

Hands-on experience in cloud DB Infrastructure (AWS / MS Azure), DevOps, CI/CD deployments is an added advantage.

Hands-on experience in NoSQL database design, development and implementation.

Example Projects:

Identify problematic database patterns in application workloads and implement/suggest solutions.

Implementing building blocks to efficiently load, analyze and migrate data.

Analyzing tables and optimizing them by adding indexes, generating separate tables, or removing unnecessary columns.

Improve application-side database load-balancing implementations.

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