Database Engineer

Position Summary

The Database Engineer owns the design, performance, availability, security, and integrity of the database tier underpinning MEDXS/MEDEX, including large-scale, highly available DoD healthcare databases holding protected health information. The position combines senior database administration with database engineering: schema and index design, replication and high availability architecture, performance tuning at scale, secure configuration and encryption, backup and recovery engineering, and the data movement required to keep theater nodes synchronized with enterprise repositories. This engineer is the authoritative technical owner of all database platforms on the contract.  Primary duty station is the Defense Health Headquarters (DHHQ), Falls Church, Virginia. On-site presence is required; telework is by Government approval only and is not guaranteed.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Administer, engineer, and sustain all production, test, development, and disaster recovery database instances supporting MEDXS/MEDEX, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server platforms as deployed.
• Design and maintain logical and physical database architecture: schema design, normalization decisions, partitioning strategy, indexing strategy, constraint and referential integrity design, and storage layout.
• Engineer and operate high availability and disaster recovery architecture, including Oracle Data Guard, Real Application Clusters, SQL Server Always On availability groups, failover clustering, log shipping, and replication topologies supporting CONUS and OCONUS nodes.
• Own backup and recovery engineering: design and implement backup strategy, validate recoverability through regular restore testing, meet defined recovery time and recovery point objectives, and maintain documented recovery runbooks.
• Perform advanced performance engineering and tuning at scale: execution plan analysis, SQL and PL/SQL or T-SQL optimization, index and statistics management, wait event and lock contention analysis, memory and I/O tuning, and workload capacity modeling.
• Implement and maintain database security in accordance with DISA database STIGs and DoD policy: least-privilege role and privilege design, privileged access control, transparent data encryption and encryption in transit, data masking for non-production environments, and comprehensive audit configuration.
• Configure, collect, and review database audit trails to satisfy RMF audit and accountability controls and HIPAA safeguards for protected health information; support audit and inspection data calls with evidence.
• Analyze and remediate database vulnerability and STIG findings from ACAS, SCAP, and manual assessment; author mitigation statements and support POA&M closure.
• Plan and execute database patching, quarterly security updates, version upgrades, and platform migrations with minimal service disruption and documented rollback plans.
• Engineer and operate data movement between theater and enterprise repositories: replication, ETL and ELT pipelines, bulk load and extract processes, reconciliation controls, and handling of intermittent or constrained connectivity.
• Support application release engineering by reviewing, testing, and deploying database change scripts through the change control process, and by maintaining version-controlled database schema baselines.
• Monitor database health, capacity, and growth; forecast storage and licensing requirements and provide technology refresh recommendations to the Lead Engineer.
• Collaborate with the Senior Information Manager on data quality, data dictionary accuracy, retention and archival implementation, and reporting performance.
• Develop and maintain database documentation: entity relationship diagrams, data dictionaries, configuration baselines, standard operating procedures, and recovery playbooks.
• Provide senior technical support to incident response for database-related Severity 1 and Severity 2 events, including corruption recovery, failover execution, and root cause analysis.
• Participate in on-call rotation and scheduled maintenance windows, including after-hours and weekend execution of database maintenance and upgrade activity.
  
  

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Information Technology from an accredited institution.
• Minimum eight (8) years of database administration and/or database engineering experience.
• Professional database administrator certification (for example, Oracle Certified Professional or a Microsoft SQL Server database administration credential), current and in good standing.
• Experience managing large-scale, highly available DoD healthcare databases.
• Ability to obtain and maintain the required security clearance and IT-I designation.
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior database engineering support to the Military Health System, Defense Health Agency, or a Service medical command.
• IAT Level II or III certification (for example, Security CE or CISSP) in addition to the platform database credential.
• Oracle Certified Master, Oracle RAC or Exadata specialization, or Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, or cloud-hosted database services in a DoD-authorized cloud environment.
• Experience with database DevOps tooling (Liquibase, Flyway, Redgate) and CI/CD for schema change.
• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related discipline.
  
  

Required Technical Skills and Competencies

• Expert Oracle Database administration (RMAN, Data Guard, RAC, ASM, Data Pump, AWR/ASH analysis) and/or expert Microsoft SQL Server administration (Always On, SSIS, SSRS, Query Store, Extended Events).
• Advanced SQL, PL/SQL, and T-SQL development and optimization; stored procedure and package engineering.
• Database security implementation: encryption at rest and in transit, privileged access management, auditing, and DISA database STIG application.
• High availability, clustering, replication, and disaster recovery engineering at enterprise scale.
• Automation and scripting: PowerShell, Bash, Python, and scheduled job frameworks; Git-based version control of schema and scripts.
• Storage and infrastructure literacy: SAN provisioning, IOPS and latency analysis, virtualization impacts on database performance.
  
  

Performance Standards

• Database availability sustained at or above the contractual Service Level Agreement for all production instances.
• Backup success and validated restore test results meeting contractual thresholds with zero unrecoverable data events.
• Recovery time and recovery point objectives demonstrated in scheduled disaster recovery exercises.
• Database STIG compliance and vulnerability remediation sustained within Government-directed thresholds and suspense dates.
  
  

Work Environment and Conditions

• Primary duty station is the Defense Health Headquarters (DHHQ), Falls Church, Virginia. On-site presence is required per the contract; telework is by Government approval only and is not guaranteed.
• Standard core hours align to Government business hours in the Eastern time zone, with on-call and after-hours support required for scheduled maintenance windows, system outages, and OCONUS time-zone coverage.
• Work is performed in a Government office and data center/NOSC environment. Occasional lifting of equipment up to 40 pounds, work in raised-floor data center spaces, and extended periods at a workstation are expected.
• Position requires a favorably adjudicated background investigation and the ability to obtain and maintain the contract-required security clearance and IT-level designation (ADP/IT-I or IT-II as assigned).
• All personnel must satisfy DoD 8570.01-M / DoD 8140 baseline certification requirements prior to being granted privileged access and must maintain continuing education to keep certifications current.