Druid DBA

Position: Druid DBA

Position Type: Fulltime

Location: Tampa, FL - Hybrid

Experience: 10 - 15 Years

Desired Skills: Artificial intelligence

Salary Range: $110,000-$125,000 a year

Job Description

Must Have Technical/Functional Skills

Total Experience: 10 to 15+ years of experience in database administration, big data engineering, or systems infrastructure.

● Apache Druid Expertise: Minimum of 5+ years of dedicated, hands-on production experience managing, troubleshooting, and tuning multi-tier Apache Druid clusters.

● Database &; Metadata Knowledge: Expert proficiency in SQL, PL/SQL, query optimization, and administering relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL) serving as Druid metadata stores.

● Streaming & Messaging: Hands-on experience integrating Druid with real-time streaming platforms (Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Pulsar).

● Distributed Systems & Storage: Solid knowledge of HDFS, AWS S3, or Blob Storage for deep storage management.

● OS &; JVM Mastery: Deep understanding of Linux OS kernel settings, networking, JVM direct memory allocation, and GC optimization.

● Automation &; DevOps: Proficiency with Linux/Bash scripting, Python, Ansible playbooks, Terraform, and CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab).

Roles & Responsibilities

We are seeking a Senior Apache Druid Database Administrator (DBA) with extensive hands-on experience in managing, optimizing, and scaling production-grade Apache Druid clusters. In this role, you will be responsible for maintaining high availability, optimizing sub-second OLAP query performance, managing streaming and batch data ingestion pipelines, and ensuring seamless platform operations across petabyte-scale datasets.

The ideal candidate will possess a deep background in distributed systems, advanced database administration, JVM tuning, and real-time event processing. You will work closely with network architects, infrastructure teams, and analytics engineers to ensure robust data reliability, capacity planning, and zero-downtime operations.

Key Responsibilities

1. Cluster Architecture & Administration

● Architect, deploy, configure, and administer multi-node, multi-tiered Apache Druid clusters across Coordinator, Overlord, Broker, Router, Historical, and MiddleManager/Indexer node roles.

● Execute zero-downtime rolling upgrades, patch management, and capacity sizing for multi-tier Historical storage pools and worker parallelism.

● Perform deep JVM tuning across all Druid service roles, including heap allocation, direct memory buffers, G1GC garbage collection parameters, and off-heap memory settings.

● Maintain cluster metadata stores (MySQL / PostgreSQL) and optimize deep storage interfaces (AWS S3, HDFS, or Azure ADLS Gen2).

2. Ingestion & Pipeline Engineering

● Manage and troubleshoot real-time streaming ingestion specs via Apache Kafka Supervisor services and Apache Flink/Spark integration.

● Design and execute batch ingestion specifications using Hadoop-based or native SQL index tasks for historical network datasets (e.g., CDR, IPDR, and telemetry logs).

● Fine-tune ingestion parameters, including taskCount, replicas, segmentGranularity, queryGranularity, and maxRowsPerSegment, to ensure sub-5-second end-to-end ingestion latency.

● Implement dead-letter queue (DLQ) handling, schema evolution management, and schema-validation enforcement.

3. Segment Lifecycle & Performance Tuning

● Design automatic compaction strategies, defining target segment size thresholds and skip offsets to eliminate segment fragmentation.

● Define data retention rules, load/drop policies, and tier assignment rules between hot and cold historical tiers to optimize storage costs against performance SLAs.

● Analyze slow query profiles via Broker access logs to tune dimension/metric cardinality, bitmap indexing, time-based partitioning, and rollup strategies.

● Apply approximate algorithms (e.g., HyperLogLog, Theta Sketches, Quantiles) where appropriate to balance query execution speed with precision.

4. Operations, Observability & Security

● Build operational dashboards and alerts using Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk/CloudWatch to track key cluster metrics (ingestion lag, segment count, cache hit ratios, GC pauses, memory pressure).

● Enforce security protocols, including Kerberos authentication, TLS/SSL encryption in transit and at rest, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), and Apache Ranger integration.

● Lead incident response, root cause analysis (RCA), and disaster recovery (DR) drills, maintaining runbooks for automated recovery and zero-loss operations.

• Education: Bachelor’s or master's degree in electrical engineering, telecommunications, computer science, or a related field.

• Experience: 12+ years of experience in mobile network applications, with at least 3 years in architecture and Kubernetes

Generic Managerial Skills:

▪ Crisis Management Staying calm during a massive network outage to direct the IT NOC team effectively.

▪ Stakeholder Mgmt. Explaining to non-technical C-level why a Druid migration is necessary

Regards,

Sajith Nair

Ztek Consulting Inc.