Teradata Infrastructure DBA

Locations: Seattle, WA / St Louis, MO / Plano, TX

 

Must have

Teradata platform expertise

• Deep knowledge of Teradata architecture: parsing, BYNET, AMP, vproc, fallback, hashing, PDCR, fallback, and spool management.

• Data distribution and primary index design; collecting statistics and understanding optimizer behavior.

• Experience with recent Teradata versions and releases migration/upgrade planning: TD 16.XX, TD 17.XX and preferably TD 20.XX.

System administration

• Provisioning and managing Teradata nodes and clusters (physical and virtual).

• OS-level skills: Linux administration (SLES/RHEL/CentOS/Oracle Linux) for Teradata on Linux, including kernel tuning, package management, user and permissions management.

• Storage subsystem knowledge: SAN, NAS, Fibre Channel, LUNs, RAID, and how storage impacts Teradata I/O and spool. 

Performance tuning and troubleshooting

• SQL query and plan analysis; collecting and interpreting Explain plans.

• Workload management (WLM) and resource allocation: query prioritization, throttling, and KRI/SLAs.

• Monitoring and diagnostics: using Teradata tools and logs to analyze spool, CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, BYNET contention.

Backup, recovery & high availability

• Best practices for backups restore procedures, and disaster recovery (DR) planning and testing.

• Knowledge of fallback, AMP resilience, replication methods and physical vs logical protection.

Security & compliance

• DB and platform-level security: roles, privileges, LDAP/Kerberos integration, encryption (at rest/in transit), auditing and compliance (SOx and Others as applicable).

• Secure configuration and hardening practices.

Networking & infrastructure

• Network architecture for Teradata clusters, VLANs, link aggregation, low-latency requirements, and BYNET tuning.

• Integration with enterprise infrastructure: DNS, NTP, monitoring stacks, and identity providers.

• Scripting languages: Bash, Python, Perl for automation, maintenance, and custom monitoring. – one of them

• Configuration management and automation tools: Ansible, Terraform, Chef, or Puppet (as used in the enterprise). – one of them

• Familiarity with Teradata utilities and tools: BTEQ, FastLoad, MultiLoad, TPT (Teradata Parallel Transporter), DBSControl, Viewpoint, Teradata Studio/SQL Assistant. – one of them

Observability & tooling

• Use of monitoring/alerting tools (Viewpoint, Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk, Nagios, etc.) and designing dashboards and alerts.  One of them, View point is mandatory

• Capacity planning, trending, and forecasting for CPU, disk, spool, and concurrency.

Soft skills & organizational capabilities

• Incident management and on-call experience

• Leading postmortems, RCA (root-cause analysis), implementing corrective actions.

• Communication and stakeholder management: vendors, management and applications

• Translate technical impacts to business stakeholders; coordinate with DBAs, developers, network/storage teams, and vendors.

 

Good to have

Project & change management

• Experience driving upgrades, migrations, and maintenance windows; adherence to change control and rollback plans.

Mentoring and leadership

• Mentoring other DBAs, establishing runbooks, knowledge transfer, and operational documentation.

• Track record of successful upgrades/migrations, complex performance tuning wins, DR tests, and SLA-driven operations.

• Proven examples of measurable improvements (reduced query runtimes, increased concurrency, reduced downtime).

• Up-to-date knowledge of Teradata product direction (e.g., Vantage features) and integration with modern data ecosystems.

Cloud & Virtualization

• Years of experience: typically 5–10+ years in enterprise data platforms; several years specifically on Teradata for senior/system roles.

Certifications (valuable, not always required)

• Teradata Certified Professional / Teradata Certified Administrator (current).

• Linux certifications (RHCSA/RHCE) and cloud provider certifications (AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform) where cloud deployments exist.

 

Role and Responsibilities

Installs, configures and upgrades Teradata software and related products.

• Backup, restore, migrate Teradata data and objects

• Establish and maintain backup and recovery policies and procedures.

• Manages and monitor system performance. proactively monitor the database systems to ensure secure services with minimum downtime

• Implements and maintains database security.

• Sets up and maintains documentation and standards.

• Supports multiple Teradata Systems including independent marts/ enterprise warehouse.

• Work with the team to ensure that the associated hardware resources allocated to the databases and to ensure high availability and optimum performance.

• Responsible for improvement and maintenance of the databases to include rollout and upgrades.

• Responsible for implementation and release of database changes as submitted by the development team, Working with end customer

• Teradata, customer, datacenter, vendor co-ordinations

• Forecast data, security audits

• User account and access management

• Teradata active system management and customer requests and system allocation

• Backup and recovery

• SOX compliance and audits

• DB support from 3rd party vendors

• Product evaluations

• On call support and major incidents

• Backup restore, frequency and retention

• Disaster recovery