Database Administrator Senior Specialist

About the Role

The Saudi Railway Company (SAR) is seeking a Database Administrator Senior Specialist to join their team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This full-time role is critical for ensuring the robust administration, availability, performance, security, and integrity of SAR’s enterprise database platforms. The specialist will manage the full lifecycle of database platforms, including backup and recovery processes.

Key Responsibilities

• Ensure databases supporting critical business and operational applications are secure, highly available, recoverable, and optimized according to SAR IT standards, cybersecurity, business continuity, and regulatory requirements.
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Application, Project Management, business teams, and technology vendors to support production services, projects, upgrades, disaster recovery, and continuous service improvement.
• Administer, maintain, monitor, and support Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database environments across all production and non-production settings.
• Design and maintain highly available and resilient database environments to meet agreed business availability, performance, RTO, and RPO requirements.
• Install, configure, upgrade, patch, migrate, and maintain Oracle and SQL Server database platforms in line with SAR standards and approved change management procedures.
• Manage Oracle RAC, Data Guard, RMAN, and other Oracle database technologies for high availability, backup, recovery, and disaster recovery.
• Manage Microsoft SQL Server high-availability and disaster recovery technologies, including Always On Availability Groups, Failover Clustering, backup, restore, and replication.
• Monitor database availability, capacity, utilization, sessions, queries, storage, and overall performance, proactively addressing potential issues.
• Identify database performance bottlenecks and perform SQL, query, indexing, memory, storage, and database parameter tuning for optimum application performance.
• Develop, implement, monitor, and regularly test database backup and recovery procedures to ensure data recoverability and integrity.
• Participate in SAR Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCP/DR) planning, testing, failover, failback, and recovery exercises, ensuring documented and validated database recovery procedures.
• Perform database creation, configuration, cloning, copying, refreshes, migrations, upgrades, and decommissioning according to approved operational procedures.
• Manage database user accounts, roles, privileges, and access permissions based on the principle of least privilege and approved access management processes.
• Implement and maintain database security controls, including authentication, authorization, auditing, encryption, vulnerability remediation, and security hardening, in coordination with the Cybersecurity team.
• Ensure database platforms comply with SAR IT policies, cybersecurity requirements, data protection requirements, and applicable national regulatory requirements.
• Review database vulnerabilities and security findings, coordinating remediation, patching, configuration changes, and risk treatment within agreed timelines.

Experience and Qualifications

• A minimum of 5 to 10 years of experience in database administration.
• Demonstrated expertise in managing Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server database environments.
• Strong understanding of high availability, disaster recovery, and security best practices for enterprise databases.

Work Environment

This is a full-time position based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, requiring close collaboration with various internal teams and external vendors to maintain and enhance SAR's critical database infrastructure.