Database Engineer
Job Description
The American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a leading research organization specializing in school reform, teacher quality, special education, adult education, and other social policy issues. The Computer and Statistical Sciences Center (CSSC) supports the Education Assessment program of American Institutes for research through software design and development and applied statistics specific to educational assessment. CSSC consists of a staff of over 50 computer scientists, software developers, statisticians/data analysts, and other IT professionals. We give our clients the ability to conduct large scale education assessments through a suite of software products and innovative technologies that include highly configurable system for tracking test items, web based system for test operations management, electronic reporting and interactive content systems, scanning and scoring software, test delivery systems that dynamically identify and adapt to student ability levels, and automated scoring of constructed responses using natural language processing.
Responsibilities:
• Participate in design and development of optimal database architectures and designs used by various software applications
• Partner with software developers to design, develop, and improve relational database schemas, stored procedures, database access layers, and triggers
• Load test and optimize database and query performance
• Review current data structures and recommend optimizations
• Work with the technical and management team to develop and maintain standards and best practices for data structures and models
• Monitor and profile database system performance and suggest optimizations as needed
• Be subject matter expert of database related issues and troubleshooting
Job Requirements
• B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, or related discipline; Masters preferred.
• 7+ years of experience as database engineer
• Deep understanding of database design principles, physical and logical data models, and database architectures
• Expert knowledge of database performance monitoring, diagnosis, and bottleneck identification. Experience with Microsoft environment and tools, such as Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, and Profiler
• Expert knowledge in query optimization, indexing, and performance tuning in particular demonstrated experience working with developers to write efficient database queries and optimize code
• Expert knowledge of SQL language. Ability to write and deploy effective triggers, stored procedures and user defined functions. Must know query optimization tools, query plan analysis, techniques for finding inefficient queries
Preferred qualifications
• Knowledge of one or more high level programming languages in particular C# , familiar with software development lifecycle, and experience with .Net environment
• Database administration and maintenance experience in development, test, and production environments. Experience with replicated Microsoft SQL Server databases in a distributed production environment.
• Ability to work with large (20 GB+ in size) databases: includes knowledge of partitioned data storage, techniques for optimal loading of large data sets, and how large data volume affects replication in SQL Server environment.
• Thorough understanding of best practices for database maintenance, including index and file management, backups, failure recovery, database defragmentation, documentation. Ability to analyze disk space requirements and hardware utilization, automate error notification. Experience with database auditing techniques.
AIR offers an excellent compensation and benefits package. For more information, please visit our website at www.air.org. To apply, please go to http://jobs-airdc.icims.com and reference job number 5597. EOE.
