Senior Database Administrator
Paystack · Cape Town, ZA ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Category
- Devops
- Experience
- 5+ years
Paystack · Cape Town, ZA ·
Paystack’s mission is to power African ambition. Over 300K businesses across Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya use Paystack’s modern payments gateway, including Qatar Airways, MTN, Burger King, UPS, Africa World Airlines, AXA Mansard Insurance, FairMoney, PiggyVest, Crocs, Under Armour, Richemont Lifestyle Group, and many others.
Over the last 10 years, we’ve built products that have helped shape online payments in Africa, from automated recurring payments to direct bank payments and automated chargebacks. Today, Paystack is part of The Stack Group (TSG), a family of technology brands building modern infrastructure across payments, banking, consumer products, and emerging technologies.
At Paystack, we hire talented people, treat them with genuine respect, and give them the space, resources, and support to do the best work of their lives. We’d love your help.
As a Senior Database Administrator at Paystack, you will be responsible for the design, implementation, performance, and reliability of our database systems. You will work closely with product engineering, DevOps, and Data teams to ensure our databases are highly available, performant, and secure. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in relational and non-relational database technologies, and an understanding of modern infrastructure practices including Infrastructure as Code, observability, and automation.
The selected engineer will report directly to the Head of Infrastructure. You will work closely with other members of the department including members of the Devops, Observability, Security teams and quite heavily with other product engineering teams.
Owns database architecture and strategy end to end, often collaborating across engineering teams.
Designs and implements database solutions that are scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant to support mission-critical payment workloads.
Plans and executes database migrations, upgrades, and schema changes with minimal downtime.
Builds and maintains automated database provisioning, backup, and recovery pipelines using Infrastructure as Code tools.
Proactively identifies and resolves performance bottlenecks through query optimisation, indexing strategies, and capacity planning.
Leverages AI-driven tools and techniques for anomaly detection, predictive performance tuning, and automated root cause analysis of database issues.
Implements and manages database monitoring and alerting using tools like Prometheus and Grafana to ensure early detection of issues.
Designs and enforces database security policies, including encryption at rest and in transit, access controls, and audit logging.
Leads incident response for database-related outages, conducts root cause analysis, and drives postmortems to prevent recurrence.
Develops and maintains disaster recovery and business continuity plans for all database systems.
Tackles ambiguous, high-risk data challenges proactively and introduces new ideas to simplify complex data architectures.
5+ years of experience as a Database Administrator or Database Reliability Engineer.
Deep expertise with relational databases such as MySQL, including replication, partitioning, and high availability configurations.
Solid experience with NoSQL databases such as Redis, MongoDB,.
Experience operating databases on AWS (RDS, Aurora) or similar cloud-managed database services .
Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform for provisioning and managing database infrastructure.
Proficiency in writing scripts and automation using SQL, Python, Bash, or similar languages.
Experience with database observability using monitoring and alerting tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch.
Experience using AI-assisted tooling (e.g., AI-powered query advisors, LLM-based copilots, or automated performance analysers) to improve database operations and troubleshooting workflows.
Strong understanding of database backup, recovery, and disaster recovery strategies.
Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues in high-throughput, low-latency transactional systems.
Ability to clearly articulate, implement, and document design decisions around data modelling and database architecture.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field might be beneficial but not required.
Experience in the fintech industry or with payment processing systems, particularly with PCI DSS compliance as it relates to data storage and handling.
Experience with database change management and CI/CD for schema migrations (e.g., Flyway, Liquibase, gh-ost).
Familiarity with data warehousing, analytical databases, or streaming platforms such as Kafka.
Competitive compensation package and benefits
13th month bonus
TSG Equity compensation
Full medical coverage
Wellbeing stipend
Hybrid working environment
Smart, kind colleagues who are invested in your growth.
Paystack is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind. We're committed to providing employees with a work environment that is progressive and open-minded. Our employment philosophy is to hire the best people and empower them to do the best work of their lives. Employment decisions are based on business needs and individual merit without regard to race, color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, nationality, marital status, gender or age.