Database Administrator DBA Database Engineer

Overview

CalAmp ’s K-12 transportation platform tracks the buses that move ~1 million students every school day across 400+ North American school districts. We run Microsoft SQL Server self-hosted on AWS EC2 — 9 production instances, 600+ customer databases, more than a billion rows of operational data, and growing. (An eventual move to AWS RDS is on the table as a future direction, not a near-term plan.)

We’re hiring a hands-on Database Engineer with strong production experience who is ready to grow into architecture, automation, and modern engineering practices.

Responsibilities

What you'll work on

Performance — the daily craft. Diagnose and fix slow queries, plan regressions, and locking storms across 9 SQL Server instances supporting customer-facing operations. You’ll inherit a decade of accumulated SQL — your first 90 days are about understanding it before re-architecting it.

Reporting replica architecture. We need to separate analytical workload from operational SQL Server before it costs us customer SLAs. You’ll lead the design — likely AWS DMS feeding a multi-tenant Aurora PostgreSQL store, but the call is yours after scoping. This is a flagship project, not a maintenance task.

Archival. Sound data retention strategy across 600+ customer DBs that doesn’t degrade restore-from-backup integrity. You’ll define the policy and own the automation.

AWS cost. SQL Server EE licensing on EC2 isn’t cheap. There’s measurable savings on the table for a DBA/Database Engineer who knows where to look — edition choice, reserved instances, right-sizing, replica strategy.

Schema migrations and ETL. Schema-change process across all customer DBs. Today this is partially manual; the goal is to make it automated, reliable, and low-risk.

Database SME for engineering — a core part of this role. You’re the subject-matter expert who reviews every schema change from developers before it ships, and you bring actionable design insight — not just approvals. Profile and optimize queries and stored procedures alongside the engineers writing them. You’re the “is this going to scale?” voice in design reviews — adding insight where it counts, not gatekeeping for the sake of it.

On-call rotation. Light by industry standards: rotation runs once every five weeks, with on-call hours from 6 AM to 11 PM Eastern. We try to keep paging events rare; we expect you to push us toward making them rarer.

What's different about this team

We use AI tools across the development lifecycle — including query analysis, schema changes, runbook authoring, and operational workflows. Our engineers ship more code per sprint with Claude Code as a pair-programmer, and we expect our DBA to do the equivalent for database work. We value candidates who are open to integrating AI into their workflow to improve speed and quality. If it means restructuring how yo