Database Administrator
Our Team:
Technology drives our business. Our team is made up of talented software engineers, infrastructure engineers, leaders and UX professionals. We care about technology as a craft and a differentiator. We bring our global products to market with a mix of software, cloud, data centers, infrastructure, design and grit.
Our Product Groups:
Individual Investor – building products like Morningstar.com and mobile apps for individuals like yourself
Institutional Investor – developing some of our flagship products like Morningstar Direct for institutional investors and our Advisor products for financial advisors
Workplace – this is where we build and provide our hosted digital advice platform for Retirement plans, 401K’s, etc. (what some call robo-advisors)
Data – this is the heart of Morningstar where all data is sourced, collected, transformed, calculated and distributed across the world
The Role:
At Morningstar, helping investors is what brings us together and drives our work. We are looking for Database Administrators and Data Engineers who specialize in relational data and SQL Server to join our team, grow with us, introduce us to new ideas and develop products that empower our users. You will have influence for ensuring process and quality adherence through peer reviews, best practices and reliability of systems. You will act as the software guardian, owning non-functional requirements, reliability, performance of our databases while addressing technical debt. Every day, you’ll work with team members across disciplines developing products for investors. You’ll interact daily with our product managers to understand our domain and create technical solutions that push us forward. We want to work with other engineers who bring knowledge and excitement about our opportunities. These positions are based in our Chicago office.
Responsibilities
- Installation and configuration of new SQL Servers and databases, in all environments from Dev through Production
- Be responsible for the health and performance management (hardware, configuration, and/or architecture/index/query changes)
- Deployment of SSIS packages, managing replication, configuration of SQL Server monitoring
- Work closely with Site Reliability Engineers for trouble-shooting and escalation
- Work closely with the software engineering teams
- Help the business define its Data Recovery Point Objectives (DRPOs)
- Ensure all database servers are backed up and verified in ways that meets the business’ DRPOs
- Enhancing data-related release processes and Data Lifecycle Management from manual to automated (including and integrating with third-party tools where required)
- Maintaining documentation on the products database environment
- Solve investors’ problems with technology and data
- Be passionate about quality, process, programming, and investing in general, seeing opportunities for improvement, seizing them, and then sharing your findings with others.
- Familiarity or desire to become an AWS expert
Additional Job Duties to Stand Out from the Crowd:
- Ensure new database code is excellent in readability, reliability, and performance through code reviews and consultation with developers
- Find most resource-intensive queries on the server, along with suggested ways to improve performance on each
- Design indexes for existing applications, choosing when to add or remove indexes
- Advise others on efficient database designs (tables, datatypes, stored procedures, functions, etc…)
Requirements
- A driven curiosity about our data and a proactive nature to get things done
- Strong need to communicate clearly, consistently, and proactively, in person and in writing
- Focus on balancing internal and external customer desires with delivering results the right way, in the right timeframe
- Desire to work as a team with daily stand-ups and regular retrospectives to discuss what went well and what can improve
- 2+ years of experience as a Database Administrator with MS SQL Server 2014+
- 1+ years on-call troubleshooting experience with at least one production SQL Server
- Expertise with RDBMS concepts including stored procedures, tables, views etc.
- Experience with performance tuning and query optimization
- Automation experience with Powershell, Python, or other scripting language
- Understanding of ETL best practices
- Finding DMV queries to answer questions about server-level performance
- Effective use of third-party tools for monitoring and administration (e.g., Solarwinds DPA/Ignite, SentryOne SQL Sentry, RedGate SQL Toolbelt, Ozar’s Tools, etc…)
- Tuning of T-SQL queries to improve performance
- Writing and improving SQL Server T-SQL queries for at least a year
- Using Profiler traces and other tools to find the most frequently run queries
- Knowledge of ORMs, including LINQ, Entity Framework, NHibernate
- Experience with Agile methodology and tools like JIRA.
Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.