Position: Database Administrator

About Us

Crown Interactive is a Nigerian-headquartered software company delivering world-class digital infrastructure solutions for Africa, by Africans. Founded in the UK in 2005 and restructured in 2012 to focus on Africa. We design and implement sovereign digital platforms for governments and critical sectors. With over two decades of experience executing complex projects, we have become Africa’s leading partner in sovereign government digital transformation, combining innovation and strong execution to deliver impactful outcomes.

Job Objective

We're looking for an experienced and detail-oriented Database Administrator (DBA) to join our growing technology team.

Are you passionate about ensuring the availability, performance, security, and reliability of critical databases? Do you enjoy solving complex database challenges, optimising system performance, and ensuring that business-critical data is secure, accurate, and always available? Do you thrive in a fast-paced technology environment where you work closely with Engineering, DevOps, Product, and Business teams?

If so, we have the perfect opportunity for you!

As the Database Administrator, you will be responsible for the administration, performance, security, availability, backup, recovery, and continuous optimisation of databases supporting our 1Gov, SaaS, Enterprise, and Power Sector solutions.

You will play a critical role in ensuring that our technology platforms have reliable, scalable, and secure database infrastructure capable of supporting high-volume transactions, enterprise applications, government digital services, and power-sector solutions.

This is an exciting opportunity for a technically strong and proactive professional who is passionate about database performance, data security, system reliability, troubleshooting, automation, and continuous improvement.

Key Roles and Responsibilities:

A. Database Administration & Operations

?        Install, configure, upgrade, patch, and maintain database management systems.

?        Administer production, staging, testing, and development databases.

?        Create and manage databases, schemas, tables, indexes, views, stored procedures, functions, and database objects.

?        Manage database users, roles, permissions, and access controls.

?        Monitor database availability, capacity, health, and performance.

?        Ensure databases remain available and reliable for business-critical applications.

?        Perform routine database maintenance, housekeeping, and optimisation.

?        Manage database configurations in line with approved architecture and operational standards.

B. Database Performance & Optimisation

?        Monitor and analyse database performance.

?        Identify slow queries, locking issues, deadlocks, bottlenecks, and inefficient database operations.

?        Perform query optimisation and indexing.

?        Review database execution plans and recommend performance improvements.

?        Establish database performance baselines and monitoring thresholds.

?        Work with developers to improve SQL queries and database design.

?        Support performance tuning for high-volume applications and transaction-intensive systems.

C. Backup, Recovery & Business Continuity

?        Develop and maintain database backup and recovery procedures.

?        Schedule and monitor automated database backups.

?        Regularly test backup restoration processes.

?        Ensure compliance with approved Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).

?        Support disaster recovery planning and implementation.

?        Maintain database replication and high-availability configurations where required.

?        Participate in disaster recovery and business continuity exercises.

?        Ensure critical databases can be restored within agreed service levels.

D. Database Security

?        Implement database security controls and access management.

?        Manage privileged database accounts and permissions.

?        Ensure users have appropriate least-privilege access.

?        Monitor and investigate unauthorised database access.

?        Support database encryption at rest and in transit.

?        Implement appropriate database auditing and logging.

?        Participate in vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and remediation activities.

?        Ensure database practices align with Crown Interactive's information security, privacy, and compliance requirements.

?        Support compliance with applicable data protection and regulatory requirements, including Nigeria's data protection requirements where applicable.

E. Database Architecture & Development Support

?        Collaborate with Solution Architects and Software Engineers on database architecture.

?        Review database designs for scalability, performance, security, and maintainability.

?        Support the design of relational and, where applicable, NoSQL database solutions.

?        Provide database expertise during application development and implementation.

?        Review database scripts and migration processes.

?        Support schema changes and database version control.

?        Ensure database changes follow approved Change Management procedures.

?        Participate in technical design reviews and architecture discussions.

F. Production Support

?        Provide Level 2/Level 3 database support for production applications.

?        Respond to database incidents and service disruptions.

?        Investigate database-related application failures.

?        Participate in incident management and root-cause analysis.

?        Maintain database incident and problem-management records.

?        Provide timely escalation of critical database issues.

?        Participate in scheduled maintenance and release activities.

?        Support after-hours or on-call activities where required for critical production systems.

Monitoring & Capacity Management

?        Implement and maintain database monitoring tools.

?        Monitor CPU, memory, storage, connections, transactions, replication, query performance, and database health.

?        Conduct database capacity planning.

?        Forecast storage and resource requirements based on business growth.

?        Identify potential capacity constraints before they affect production.

?        Maintain dashboards and reports for database availability and performance.

?        Establish alerts for critical database conditions.

Data Integrity & Quality

?        Maintain database integrity, consistency, and reliability.

?        Implement appropriate constraints, validation, and data-control mechanisms.

?        Investigate data inconsistencies and integrity issues.

?        Support data cleansing and migration activities.

?        Ensure database changes do not compromise existing application data.

?        Collaborate with application teams to resolve data-related issues.

Documentation & Governance

?        Maintain accurate database architecture and configuration documentation.

?        Document backup, recovery, replication, security, and maintenance procedures.

?        Maintain database inventory and ownership records.

?        Document production database changes.

?        Maintain standard operating procedures and runbooks.

?        Contribute to technology policies, standards, and database governance frameworks.

Required Skills & Competencies

1.     Relational Databases

• PostgreSQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• MySQL / MariaDB
• Oracle Database

2.     Database Technologies

• SQL
• Database replication
• High availability
• Database clustering
• Partitioning
• Indexing
• Query optimisation
• Stored procedures
• Database migrations
• Backup and recovery

3.     Cloud & Infrastructure

• AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud
• Linux and Windows Server environments
• Docker and containerised environments
• Kubernetes is an advantage
• Cloud-managed database services

4.     DevOps & Monitoring

• Git / version control
• CI/CD pipelines
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Database monitoring and alerting
• Logging and observability tools

5.     Security

• Database access control
• Encryption
• Auditing and logging
• Vulnerability remediation
• Privileged access management

Experience and Qualifications

?        Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field.

? 7–8 years' relevant experience in database administration or database engineering.

?        Relevant professional certifications in database administration, cloud computing, or information technology are an advantage.

?        Relevant experience as a Database Administrator, Database Engineer, or similar role.

?        Experience managing production databases in a technology, SaaS, enterprise, government, telecommunications, financial services, utilities, or similarly complex environment.

?        Experience supporting high-availability and business-critical systems.

?        Experience with database backup, recovery, performance tuning, and security.

?        Experience working within Agile and DevOps environments is an advantage.

?        Experience with large-scale transaction processing is an advantage.

If you think you have what it takes to join our dynamic and vibrant team, please click the apply button to submit your application and forward your CV to careers@crowninteractive.com or recruitment@cicod.com