Database Administrator (DBA)
Keeps the database fast, backed up and recoverable — and is the person who knows whether last night’s backup would actually restore.
Who to hire
The shape of person who does this job well — and whether you should be hiring it at all yet.
One of the few titles that means the same thing in every country, and one of the few technical hires that is still genuinely scarce. Most companies under fifty people do not have one and do not need one: a backend engineer who understands indexes covers it until the data is large, regulated, or the uptime is contractual.
Education
No requirement. Deep platform knowledge — Postgres, SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL — is the qualification, and it is platform-specific.
Experience
5+ years on your platform. Ask about the last restore they performed under pressure, and how long it took. If they have never restored, they have a backup strategy they have never tested.
Vertical / domain experience
Platform domain is everything, and regulated data adds residency, encryption and retention obligations on top.
What it pays, roughly
$95,992 median, Canada — for Computer and information systems professionals, the closest occupation Statistics Canada actually measures, measured from $85,010 to $103,002 over 202,605 people. That occupation is broader than this role, so read it as an anchor, not a salary band — and note that a startup usually pays below it in cash and above it in equity.
Credentials and certifications
What exists, who issues it, and whether it means anything for this seat. A credential is evidence of a floor, never of judgment — and in a few of these roles it is a legal requirement rather than a nice-to-have.
| Credential | Issued by | When it matters | Skiploma |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle, Microsoft and PostgreSQL certifications | Oracle, Microsoft, EDB and others | Platform-specific and meaningful, because the work is platform-specific. | — |
| Cloud database specialty certifications | AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure | Where the database is managed rather than self-hosted, which it increasingly is. | — |
What this role does at each stage
The same title means three different jobs depending on how much money is in the bank. Read the stage you are at, then read the next one — that is what you are hiring toward.
Nobody. Use a managed database and turn on automated backups today, not later.
Still nobody. A managed service plus a backend engineer who reads query plans.
A seat where the data is large, regulated, or the uptime is in a customer contract.
Can one person hold this and something else?
The whole point of the many-hats problem: which of these jobs merge safely into one person, and which merges quietly cost you money or control.
Merges well with
- Backend Engineer / Back-End Developer
- DevOps Engineer / DevOps Specialist
- Data Engineer / Data Developer
DBA and DevOps merge naturally — both are about systems that have to stay up. DBA and backend merge until the data outgrows the attention.
Keep separate from
No conflict, but the person who can delete production data should not be the only person who can verify the backups.
Reading a candidate
What good looks like in an hour, and what should stop the process.
Good signals
- Asks about recovery time objectives in the interview
- Has restored under pressure
- Reads query plans rather than guessing
Red flags
- Backups never tested
- No view on retention or residency
- Tuning by superstition
The same role in three kinds of company
This job changes shape depending on who is paying for it. An agency sells the hours, a contract shop delivers into someone else's estate, and a product company is building something it keeps — and the same title means something different in each.
In an agency
Agencies rarely employ one and should keep a contractor on call — the day a client’s database is corrupted is not the day to start looking.
On a client contract
On contract, who holds the production credentials is a question to settle in writing before go-live, not after.
In a product company
In a product company, the DBA conversation usually begins the first time a query takes down the site at month end.
What this role runs on
The software categories this job lives in. Each links to our buying brief and to the research behind it.
| Category | Who the default is | What leaving costs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ERP — Enterprise Resource Planning | SAP | Implementation sunk cost | The research → |
| CNAPP & Cloud Security Posture Management | Wiz, now inside Google | Agentless scanning needs cloud-account trust relationships, and those are granted once and rarely re-granted | The research → |