Senior Database Administrator

About Paystack

Paystack's mission is to power African ambition. Over 300K of some of the most renowned businesses in Nigeria, as well as a growing number of merchants in South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya use Paystack's modern payments gateway. They include the likes of MTN, Burger King, UPS, AXA Mansard Insurance, FairMoney, PiggyVest, FilmHouse Cinemas, Smile Communications, Air Peace Airlines, Crocs, Under Armour, Richemont Lifestyle Group (RLG), and many others.

In just over 9 years, our growing team has introduced a steady cadence of innovation within the online payments landscape, such as automated recurring payments, the ability for customers to pay directly from their bank accounts, automated chargebacks, and much more. We've been acquired by Stripe and are doubling down on the mission to help build out Africa's payments infrastructure.

We're obsessed with building the best place to work on the continent while accelerating digital commerce across Africa and we need your help!

Role Summary

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.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Beneficial

• 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.

Soft Skills

• Impeccable problem-solving and analytical abilities, especially under pressure during incidents.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to explain complex database concepts to non-database engineers.
• High agency and the ability to work independently while keeping stakeholders informed.
• A strong sense of ownership over data reliability and a commitment to operational excellence.
• Adaptability and willingness to learn new database technologies and infrastructure tooling.

Team and Reporting Structure

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.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Interest-free loan (up to 30% of salary)
• Full medical coverage
• MacBook Pro
• Hybrid working environment
• Work from Home budget
• Monthly internet stipend
• Monthly well-being stipend
• Generous personal leave policy and annual slow days
• Fully covered parental leave and sabbatical policies
• Smart, kind colleagues who're 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.