Hiring: Database Services Manager (IT Director I) - 60025271 Company: State of South Carolina Location: Lexington County, SC Job Posted Time: 2026-09-16 12:33:24 Employment Type: Remote Target Skills & Keywords : Azure, Azure DevOps, Change Management, Digital Transformation, Encryption, Helm, Oracle Database, REST, SQL, SQL Server, Terraform About the job Required Skills: •The mission of the South Carolina Department of Education is to serve students, support teachers, empower parents, and engage the community so that every student graduates prepared to reach their full potential. •Enterprise Database Operations & Team Leadership (40%) •Build and mentor a team of database professionals. Set strategic direction, develop talent, and create an environment where the team takes ownership of mission-critical systems and loves solving hard problems. •Own two hundred plus (200+) production SQL Server instances across development, UAT, staging, and production environments serving mission-critical K-12 applications. •Deliver ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent (99.99%) uptime for systems serving thousands of educators and millions of student records through proactive monitoring, capacity planning, and rigorous change management. •Design and maintain high-availability architectures (Always On Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances) that eliminate unplanned downtime and enable rapid disaster recovery. •Document and test recovery procedures against defined RTO/RPO targets, so the agency can weather any disruption without losing data. •Reduce query execution time by thirty percent plus (30%+) and improve system responsiveness through advanced tuning: execution plan analysis, index optimization, partitioning strategies, and query rewrites across multi-terabyte databases. Qualifications: •This position is located in the Office of Information Technology. •A bachelor's degree in communications, business administration, information technology, mathematics, statistics, management information science or a related field and experience in telecommunications, data processing and/or information technology. •Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience. •Seven (7) years of progressive database administration experience, including at least three (3) years in a supervisory or team lead capacity managing DBA staff or contractor resources. •Expert-level experience administering Microsoft SQL Server environments including installation, configuration, performance tuning, high availability (Always On AG, FCI), and major version upgrade planning. •Demonstrated experience leading database migration or modernization projects, including planning, execution, and post-migration validation. •Applied hands-on capability in Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or comparable cloud database platforms. •Prior experience in state government, K-12 education, or a similarly regulated data environment with Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) or comparable student/citizen data privacy obligations. •Microsoft SQL Server or Azure Database Administrator certifications (Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate, or equivalent). •Prior experience in state government or public sector IT operations. Compensation: •Flexible work environment (work from home / hybrid options) •Competitive benefits and rewards package Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!