Database Administrator (Remote- Top Secret Clearance) San Diego
About the position Please note: This role is contingent upon a contract award. While it is not an immediate opening, we are actively conducting interviews and extending offers in anticipation of the award. ICF is a mission-driven company filled with people who care deeply about improving the lives of others and making the world a better place. Our core values include Embracing Difference; we seek candidates who are passionate about building a culture that encourages, embraces, and hires dimensions of difference. Our Engineering and Emerging Technologies (EET) team works side by side with customers to articulate a vision for success, and then make it happen. We know success doesn't happen by accident. It takes the right team of people, working together on the right solutions for the customer. We are looking for a seasoned DBA who will be a key driver to make this happen. We are seeking a skilled DBA to support daily operations of IT systems for a government program. You will manage and optimize production databases supporting the DoD MCC JAS program, ensuring high availability, performance, and data integrity.
Responsibilities
- Monitor database performance and implement tuning strategies.
- Ensure data integrity, backups, and disaster recovery readiness.
- Collaborate with development teams on schema design, query optimization, and data modeling (OLTP/OLAP).
- Support database security and access controls in compliance with DoD standards.
- Maintain documentation and change control procedures.
- Lead database upgrades and migrations.
- Automate routine tasks (backups, patching, user provisioning) with versioned scripting and CI/CD.
- Participate in on-call rotation, incident response, root-cause analysis, and capacity planning.
- Integrate monitoring and alerting.
Requirements
- Candidate must have an active DoD Top Secret Clearence.
- Security+ or equivalent certification required.
- 7+ years of experience as a DBA in federal environments.
Nice-to-haves
- Bachelor's in CS/IT/Engineering or equivalent experience; advanced degree a plus.
- Vendor certifications (AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, etc).
- Expertise in SQL Server, Oracle, or PostgreSQL.
- Experience with cloud-based DB solutions (AWS RDS, Azure SQL).
- Strong understanding of database security and compliance requirements.
- Hands-on performance tuning (query tuning, indexing strategy, stats maintenance, I/O and memory pressure analysis).
- Solid understanding of networking, OS fundamentals (Windows/Linux), and storage concepts relevant to databases.
- Scripting ability in at least one: PowerShell, Bash, or Python.
- Experience hardening and accrediting systems under DoD RMF.
- Familiarity with data integration & messaging (ETL/ELT tools, CDC, Kafka), and supporting analytics/BI workloads.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code and config management (Terraform, Ansible) for DB infrastructure and parameter baselines.
- Experience building database observability: custom metrics, log pipelines, SIEM integration (Splunk/Elastic).
- Prior work in FedRAMP IL4/IL5 or impact-level cloud environments.