Cassandra DBA / Engineer

Job Description

Role: Cassandra DBA / Engineer

Experience: 7+ Years

Work Location: Phoenix, AZ - Onsite

Project Duration: 12+ Months Contract

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, configure, and maintain enterprise-grade highly available and scalable Cassandra clusters supporting business-critical applications and services.
• Manage and administer Cassandra and other NoSQL/open-source database platforms to ensure stability, availability, reliability, and optimal performance.
• Demonstrate strong understanding of Cassandra architecture, replication strategies, consistency levels, partitioning, data modeling, token distribution, and multi-data-center deployments.
• Design Cassandra cluster topology and perform capacity planning based on application workloads, scalability, availability, and performance requirements.
• Perform Cassandra performance analysis and tuning to optimize read/write performance, throughput, and latency.
• Tune Cassandra compaction strategies, caching, consistency levels, tombstones, SSTables, and database configuration parameters.
• Identify and resolve hot partitions, slow queries, high latency, and database or infrastructure resource bottlenecks.
• Manage Cassandra cluster lifecycle activities including installations, upgrades, migrations, patching, capacity expansion, and configuration changes.
• Add, replace, remove, and safely decommission Cassandra nodes while maintaining cluster availability and data integrity.
• Perform cluster expansion and capacity upgrades with minimal production impact.
• Manage token distribution, node bootstrap and streaming, repair, cleanup, and cluster rebalancing activities.
• Implement and maintain Cassandra backup and restore strategies, including snapshots and incremental backups.
• Support point-in-time recovery where supported by the organization's backup solution and conduct recovery testing.
• Develop and support disaster-recovery procedures and ensure Cassandra environments meet availability and business continuity requirements.
• Tune Cassandra JVM heap, garbage collection, memory, and related configuration settings.
• Troubleshoot JVM and system-level issues including GC pauses, heap pressure, CPU utilization, disk I/O, memory, and storage performance.
• Tune Linux/OS and storage configurations to support Cassandra database workloads.
• Monitor Cassandra cluster health, availability, latency, throughput, disk usage, compactions, dropped messages, GC activity, repairs, and overall capacity.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues including node failures, high latency, timeouts, replica inconsistencies, capacity problems, and cluster instability.
• Use nodetool, Cassandra logs, metrics, tracing, and monitoring/alerting platforms to diagnose and resolve database issues.
• Proactively identify opportunities for performance optimization, scalability improvements, reliability, and operational efficiency.
• Develop and implement database automation solutions to streamline administration, deployment, maintenance, monitoring, and operational processes.
• Develop scripts, utilities, and engineering tools using technologies such as Python, Shell Scripting, Java, or Go.
• Automate database administration and infrastructure processes using Ansible and other automation frameworks.
• Collaborate with architecture and business teams to translate data requirements into effective conceptual, logical, and physical data models.
• Support distributed and highly available database environments while ensuring reliability, resiliency, and fault tolerance.
• Work closely with application development, infrastructure, platform engineering, and support teams to ensure seamless integration of Cassandra database services.
• Contribute to database standards, governance practices, operational procedures, and engineering best practices.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and observability solutions to improve visibility into database health and performance.
• Participate in cloud adoption initiatives and support Cassandra database workloads across modern cloud platforms.
• Contribute to CI/CD initiatives and help integrate database deployment and operational processes into automated delivery pipelines.
• Support Agile delivery teams by participating in sprint planning, technical reviews, deployments, production support, and continuous improvement activities.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, or a related technical discipline; advanced degree preferred.
• 5+ years of professional experience in database engineering, database development, or database administration.
• Strong hands-on experience with Cassandra database administration and engineering in enterprise production environments.
• Strong understanding of Cassandra architecture, replication, consistency levels, partitioning, data modeling, token distribution, and multi-DC deployments.
• Experience designing and managing highly available, scalable, and fault-tolerant Cassandra clusters.
• Hands-on experience with Cassandra node management, including node addition, replacement, removal, decommissioning, bootstrap, streaming, repair, cleanup, and cluster rebalancing.
• Experience with Cassandra capacity planning, cluster topology design, expansion, and infrastructure upgrades.
• Strong experience with Cassandra performance analysis and tuning, including:
• Read/write performance and latency
• Compaction
• Caching
• Consistency levels
• Tombstones
• SSTables
• Hot partitions
• Slow queries
• Cassandra configuration
• Experience managing operational activities such as:
• Database upgrades and migrations
• Patch management
• Capacity planning and expansion
• Backup and recovery
• Performance analysis and tuning
• High availability and disaster recovery implementations
• Strong knowledge of Cassandra backup and recovery, including snapshots, incremental backups, restore procedures, and recovery testing.
• Strong understanding of JVM heap, garbage collection, memory management, CPU utilization, disk I/O, Linux/OS, and storage tuning.
• Strong hands-on experience troubleshooting Cassandra production environments using nodetool, Cassandra logs, metrics, tracing, and monitoring tools.
• Strong understanding of database architecture, storage concepts, indexing strategies, replication mechanisms, and query optimization.
• Experience creating and maintaining conceptual, logical, and physical data models.
• Ability to collaborate effectively with development, infrastructure, architecture, and production support teams.
• Experience supporting distributed systems and multi-tier application environments.
• Proficiency in one or more programming or scripting languages such as:
• Python
• Shell Scripting
• Java
• Go
• Understanding of API-driven architectures and modern application integration patterns.
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies and software delivery practices.
• Experience working with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving capabilities.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.