Senior Database DBA with MemSQL/SingleStore

Job Title: Senior Database DBA with MemSQL/SingleStore
Location: New Jersey / Irving, TX / Tampa, FL (Hybrid)

Duration: Long term Contract

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior MemSQL / SingleStore Cluster Administrator to own and manage mission-critical, large-scale distributed database platforms. This role requires a pure Database Administrator (DBA) with deep expertise in handling petabyte-scale data, complex distributed clusters, and real-time latency-sensitive workloads.

Core Technical Expectations

• Experience handling petabytes of data ingested every 15 minutes in large-scale environments.
• Strong expertise managing large MemSQL / SingleStore clusters (multi-node, multi-TB to multi-PB).
• Deep understanding of data distribution across aggregators and leaf nodes.

Expertise in:

• Partitioning and shard key strategy
• Data skew mitigation
• Hot partition resolution
• Worker node and leaf node optimization
• Strong table-level knowledge including:
• Index strategy
• Thread management
• Connection pooling
• Memory limits
• Query plan optimization
• Strong understanding of different MemSQL/SingleStore versions and corresponding architectural/feature changes.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-end ownership of large MemSQL/SingleStore clusters (design, build, upgrade, operate, decommission).
• Architect and maintain High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) setups including:
• Redundancy levels
• Availability groups
• Cross-region replication

Plan and execute:

• Cluster expansion
• Downsizing
• Online partition rebalancing
• Leaf node management with minimal/no downtime
• Proactively monitor cluster health, throughput, latency, and capacity; define and maintain SLAs.
• Perform advanced performance tuning:
• Schema design
• Shard key design
• Index strategy
• NUMA and memory tuning
• Workload management
• Implement backup/restore strategies and regularly test DR & failover.
• Lead incident response and perform deep root cause analysis.
• Enforce database security best practices:
• Authentication & authorization
• Encryption
• Auditing
• Network controls
• Drive automation using scripting (Python/Bash) and Infrastructure as Code.
• Maintain documentation, operational runbooks, and standards.
• Evaluate new MemSQL/SingleStore features and lead version upgrades and migrations.

Required Experience & Skills

• 10+ years of total database engineering/administration experience.
• 4–5+ years of deep, production-grade experience administering MemSQL/SingleStore clusters at scale.
• Strong hands-on experience with:
• Aggregators & leaf nodes
• Licensing and memory limits
• Cluster expansion & partition rebalancing
• Replication & failover/failback

Proven ability to diagnose:

• Locking issues
• Data skew
• Hot partitions
• Bad execution plans

Strong Linux system tuning knowledge:

• CPU/NUMA affinity
• Disk & I/O optimization
• Networking
• ulimits & OS-level tuning

Experience with monitoring & alerting tools:

• Prometheus / Grafana
• Datadog
• Splunk
• ELK
• Strong SQL expertise and scripting (Python/Bash).
• Experience in Cloud/Container environments (AWS/Azure/Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes) is highly preferred.
• Excellent communication skills with ability to lead production calls and explain technical trade-offs clearly.