Database Administrator

What are we building?

Hard Rock Digital is a team focused on becoming the best online sportsbook, casino, and social casino company in the world. We’re building a team that resonates with passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We care about each customer’s interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and we strive to ensure we’re always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the new 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?

Hard Rock Digital runs a high-throughput transactional platform serving millions of users across online sportsbook, casino, and social casino products. Every bet, wager, and payout flows through our database layer.

We’re hiring a Database Administrator to own the reliability, performance, and evolution of that layer — primarily CockroachDB and PostgreSQL, with growing investment in streaming and real-time analytics infrastructure. You’ll operate production distributed systems, but you’ll also shape how we build, monitor, and reason about them. This is not a ticket-queue DBA role. You’ll have direct influence on architecture decisions and engineering culture.

We expect you to use modern tooling — including AI-assisted development, query analysis, and operational automation — to multiply your effectiveness. The goal is not to automate yourself out of a job; it’s to spend less time on toil and more time on problems that matter.

What You’ll Do

Database Operations & Performance

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

• Own query performance: identify regressions, tune execution plans, advise application teams on schema design and access patterns.

• Manage database capacity planning, scaling events, and upgrade cycles with minimal customer impact.

• Design and enforce standards for schema changes, migrations, and data lifecycle management.

Observability & Incident Response

• Build and maintain database observability: dashboards, alerting, anomaly detection, and SLO tracking (Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent).

• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response for data-layer issues. Drive blameless postmortems and durable remediation.

• Instrument databases and surrounding infrastructure to surface leading indicators of degradation before they become incidents.

Automation & Infrastructure

• Automate provisioning, configuration, backup, and recovery using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, or similar).

• Build and maintain internal tooling for database management, monitoring, and self-service operations.

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

Security & Compliance

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

• Support compliance requirements related to data protection, audit logging, and retention policies.

AI-Augmented Workflows

• Use AI tools (LLMs, code assistants, natural-language query analysis) to accelerate troubleshooting, documentation, code generation, and operational runbooks.

• Evaluate and integrate AI-assisted observability and anomaly detection tooling into database operations.

• Contribute to internal knowledge sharing on effective use of AI in database engineering workflows.

Culture & Knowledge Sharing

• Establish and maintain a Database Center of Excellence: documentation, standards, best practices, and reusable patterns.

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

• Stay current with CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, and broader data infrastructure developments. Bring what you learn back to the team.

What are we looking for?

Required

• 5+ years as a Database Administrator or comparable infrastructure role.

• 2+ years of hands-on experience with CockroachDB in production.

• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, distributed transactions, consistency models, failure modes.

• Proficiency in SQL — not just querying, but schema design, indexing strategy, and execution plan analysis.

• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, or equivalent).

• Comfortable writing tools and automation in Python or a similar language.

• Practical experience with monitoring and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar).

• Demonstrated ability to use AI tools (LLMs, code assistants) productively in technical workflows. We don’t need prompt engineering certifications — we need someone who reflexively reaches for these tools when they’re the right lever.

• Clear technical communication, written and verbal. You’ll work across teams.

Preferred

• Experience with PostgreSQL, Cassandra, or other distributed databases beyond CockroachDB.

• Familiarity with streaming data infrastructure: Kafka, Materialize, ClickHouse, or similar.

• Experience with data warehousing platforms (Snowflake preferred).

• Cloud platform depth (AWS preferred; GCP or Azure also valuable).

• Exposure to SRE practices: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management frameworks.

• CockroachDB certification or advanced training.

• Experience with database migration strategies across major version upgrades or platform changes.

What’s in it for you?

We offer our employees more than just competitive compensation. Our team benefits include:

• Competitive pay and benefits

• Flexible vacation allowance

• Flexible work from home or office hours

• Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand

• Opportunity to build products enjoyed by millions as part of a passionate team

Roster of Uniques

We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us, and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. Our vision for our business and customers is built on fostering a diverse and inclusive work environment where, regardless of background or beliefs, you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We want to celebrate you being you (we are an equal opportunity employer).