Senior Database Administrator

What are we building?

Hard Rock Digital is a fiercely focused team working to become the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We're building a deeply curious team with a passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We're customer-obsessed — we care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and strive to ensure we're always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We're taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us?

What's the position?

Every bet and payout at Hard Rock Digital is a database transaction that has to be fast and accurate. A casino game resolves in milliseconds; settling a big sporting event moves millions of balances at once, and none can be wrong.

We're hiring a Senior Database Administrator to own production reliability for our CockroachDB and PostgreSQL fleet. You'll diagnose contention, range hotspots, retry storms, plan regressions, and cross-region latency in systems that move money at scale. You'll read execution plans and reason about the optimizer that produced them, inspect database internals when behavior doesn't match the docs, write Go and Python tooling that makes the next incident faster to solve, and set standards that application engineers rely on under pressure.

Claude Code, Codex, and similar AI harnesses are part of how this team works. You'll use them to investigate incidents, generate probes, summarize evidence, and turn one-off debugging into durable tooling. The goal is to spend less time on toil and more on the work that compounds: better defaults, safer migrations, and tooling that makes the next incident shorter than the last.

What You'll Do

Reliability & Performance

• Operate and evolve multi-region CockroachDB clusters and PostgreSQL instances across production, staging, and development.

• Investigate contention, serialization retries (SQLSTATE 40001), and range hotspots in the transaction paths behind bets, wagers, settlements, and payouts.

• Diagnose leaseholder placement, monotonic-key write pressure, and cross-region latency that turn one query into several network round trips.

• Trace a slow query to its execution plan, the plan to optimizer behavior, and the behavior to the schema or application call path that caused it.

• Catch plan regressions after statistics changes, schema changes, data growth, or releases, then turn the fix into a safer rollout pattern.

• Assess schema-change and backfill risk before it reaches large tables: lock behavior, retry pressure, capacity impact, and rollback path.

• Plan capacity, scaling events, and version upgrades that customers don't feel.

Observability & Incident Response

• Build database observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, Loki, and Snowflake: dashboards backed by real queries, alerting on leading indicators, and SLO tracking.

• Connect database symptoms to application behavior and business events so alerts point at causes.

• Join the on-call rota for the data layer, lead incident analysis when the database is part of the failure, and drive blameless postmortems toward durable fixes.

• Instrument the system to surface degradation before it becomes an incident.

Automation & Tooling

• Build Go and Python tools that make incidents easier to understand: log collectors, explain-plan analyzers, migration checks, capacity models, and runbook generators.

• Automate provisioning, configuration, backup, and recovery with Terraform and other infrastructure-as-code tools.

• Work with platform engineering on CI/CD, deployment safety, and change management for database-touching services.

AI-Augmented Engineering

• Use Claude Code, Codex, and similar harnesses in daily work to investigate incidents, generate probes, draft runbooks, and write tooling.

• Keep the harness grounded in logs, traces, metrics, and source code, and verify its output against production facts before you ship it.

• Evaluate AI-assisted observability and anomaly detection, and share what works with the team.

Security & Compliance

• Implement and audit access controls, authentication, authorization, and encryption in transit and at rest.

• Support data-protection, audit-logging, and retention requirements for a regulated gaming platform.

Standards & Mentorship

• Build a database center of excellence: documentation, standards, and reusable patterns that other teams build against.

• Mentor engineers on database fundamentals, distributed-systems behavior, and operational discipline.

• Read CockroachDB and PostgreSQL internals when a problem needs a code-level answer, and bring what you learn back to the team.