Senior Database Administrator

Onsite in Washington, DC

The organization is a premier technology integrator delivering technical, engineering, intelligence, and enterprise IT solutions across mission and enterprise life cycles. Teams design, develop, and sustain offerings that support diplomatic missions, defense requirements, and exploration from the ocean floor to outer space, maintaining leadership in supply chain, hardware integration, and global network integration with a commitment to ethics and integrity.

This is a contract to hire opportunity. Applicants must be willing and able to work on a W2 basis and convert to FTE following contract duration. For our W2 consultants, we offer a great benefits package that includes Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits, 401k with company matching, and life insurance.

Rate: $55.00 to $65.00/hr w2.

• Design, configure, administer, and troubleshoot SQL Server Always On Availability Groups for mission‑critical production environments.
• Manage AG architectures including listeners, replicas, quorum, synchronization modes, and failover strategies.
• Perform planned and unplanned failovers, disaster recovery testing, and high‑availability validation.
• Troubleshoot AG issues including replication lag, failover failures, connection routing, and performance degradation.
• Support Always On across on‑premises, VMware, and Azure environments and enable low‑downtime deployments.
• Own and execute mandatory monthly patching for SQL Server and Oracle, including CUs, service packs, hotfixes, and quarterly PSU/CPU.
• Coordinate database patching with OS and infrastructure cycles, including pre‑ and post‑patch validation and rollback verification.
• Maintain patching documentation, compliance evidence, validation checklists, and audit artifacts, including STIG‑driven and emergency patching.
• Install, configure, and manage SQL Server instances and tools such as SSMS, SSRS, SSIS, and SSAS.
• Administer clustering, replication, log shipping, and mirroring solutions.
• Monitor performance, integrity, availability, and security and perform maintenance such as index rebuilds, statistics updates, and DBCC checks.
• Plan and execute upgrades, migrations, and platform transitions including on‑premises to cloud.
• Analyze execution plans, optimize SQL, and resolve blocking, deadlocks, and bottlenecks.
• Use monitoring tools including SQL Profiler, Extended Events, and Performance Monitor.
• Manage users, roles, and permissions following least‑privilege principles and maintain audit logs.
• Document architectures, Always On designs, patching procedures, and runbooks and report on availability, patching status, performance, capacity, and growth.