Company Description: 

d.light is a global leader in delivering affordable solar energy and financial solutions to underserved markets. Since 2007, our innovations have transformed lives, providing reliable access to energy, appliances, and digital financial services for over 200 million people across 60+ countries. Leveraging technology and inclusive financing models like Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG), we are reshaping how households and businesses access power and financial tools for growth.

As we continue to scale, data is at the core of our operations — powering financial inclusion, operational efficiency, and customer experience. We are seeking a Database Administrator (DBA) to lead and evolve our data infrastructure.

Position Overview

As a DBA, you will own and optimize the performance, reliability, scalability, and security of d.light’s critical database systems. You will design and execute the database architecture roadmap, lead production operations, collaborate across product and engineering teams, and ensure data is always available to serve our growing customer base and business needs.

This is a hands-on leadership role ideal for a data professional who thrives in high-growth, high-impact environments with complex transactional systems at global scale.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Lead the design, implementation, and optimization of scalable and highly available database systems across transactional, analytical, and reporting workloads.

• Architect and implement database security, encryption, access control, and audit mechanisms aligned with global data privacy standards (GDPR, PCI-DSS, local regulations).

• Develop and maintain robust disaster recovery, replication, and backup strategies ensuring business continuity.

• Proactively monitor database health, optimize query performance, indexing, locking, and resource utilization.

• Partner with product, software engineering, analytics, finance, and business operations teams to deliver data solutions that support PAYG, financial services, credit scoring, and customer insights.

• Automate routine database administration tasks via scripting, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and CI/CD pipelines.

• Evaluate, recommend, and integrate new database technologies including cloud-native services, NoSQL, data lakes, and streaming platforms.

• Ensure data consistency, integrity, and availability across distributed geographies and payment systems.

• Analyze business needs and translate them into efficient data models, schemas, and data flows.

• Provide expert guidance on capacity planning, growth forecasting, and future-proofing the data platform.

Requirements

Desired Skills and Experience:

• 7+ years of hands-on database administration experience managing production systems.

• Proven leadership managing mission-critical databases supporting financial transactions, mobile money, or payments is highly desirable.

• Expert-level proficiency with relational database engines such as PostgreSQL (strongly preferred), MySQL, Oracle, or MSSQL.

• Demonstrated experience with cloud database platforms: AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB), Google Cloud SQL, or equivalent.

• Solid understanding of modern database design principles: normalization, indexing, sharing, partitioning, clustering, replication.

• Strong proficiency in performance tuning, query optimization, monitoring tools, and troubleshooting.

• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) for database provisioning and management.

• Familiarity with NoSQL systems (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, etc.) and data lake architectures is a strong advantage.

• Strong knowledge of data privacy regulations, security standards, and compliance frameworks.

• Professional, precise communication with both technical and non-technical teams.

• Experience working in Agile/Scrum teams and collaborating cross-functionally with diverse stakeholders.

• Experience in high-growth, fast-paced technology companies is a plus.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; certifications in PostgreSQL, AWS Database, or related disciplines are advantageous.

We are an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.