Sr. PostgreSQL DBA at Etsy Inc.

Location: United States

Description:

Etsy is seeking a bright and seasoned PostgreSQL DBA to be in charge of our databases. We are looking for someone who is highly motivated to work in a fast paced small team environment. You will be involved in creating, maintaining and managing high availability PostgreSQL databases in a Linux environment.

Interested candidates should send their solutions to the problems at the bottom of this page, along with their resume, to work@etsy.com.

Primary responsibilities:

• Managing 24/7/365 high availability PostgreSQL databases
• Responsible for database data integrity
• Work closely with the development team to design optimal database schemas and stored procedures
• Work closely with System Operations to research and plan optimal hardware for growth
• Proactively research and avert database related issues
  

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent
• 5-7 years PostgreSQL or related DB administration experience
• 2+ years in a 24/7/365 environment
• Experience tuning linux to get the best performance possible for PostgreSQL
• PostgreSQL configuration and performance tuning experience
• Experience in terabyte-sized OLTP environment
• Experience with database layouts on high performance disk subsystems
• Experience working with PostgreSQL backups
• Experience performing a full restore to a PostgreSQL database using dumps and transaction logs. Disaster Recovery Experience
• Experience with DB replication, clustering, and table partitioning
• Excellent SQL and PLpgSQL skills
• Knowledge of Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views, and Types
• Understand use of Normalization and Denormalization, benefits of each
• Networking Experience - TCP/IP Database Connectivity (JDBC, ODBC, etc.)
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
• Strong interpersonal and relationship building skills conducive to team development
• Perl/Python/Shell scripting
  

Technical Problems:

General

• 1. Foriegn Keys. What are they, what are the benefits, what are the downsides?
• 2. Tablespaces. What are they and how are they usefull?
• 3. How do I figure out how large my database is, and what tables/indexes are the biggest?
• 4. Normalization. What are the benefits, and what are the drawbacks? Be sure to discuss join complexity.
  

A bit more specific

• You have two identical machines with no shared storage between them. Your application currently uses one of them as a primary master database and leaves the second one is untouched. How would you set up the secondary machine to be a warm standby of the primary using Postgresql 8.1? How about Postgresql 8.2?
• Someone comes to you and says, "My PG database is slow!" How would you start the process of figuring out what was wrong? What tools would you use?
• You're looking through the pg log files and you come across this little gem: "Deadlock detected, Process 4893 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3372155030; blocked by process 10835. Process 10835 waits for ShareLock on transaction 3372152381; blocked by process 4893." What does it mean, and how would you go about resolving the issue?

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