Cassandra DBA / Engineer

Experience: 7+ Years

Work Location: Phoenix, AZ - Onsite

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.