Database Administrator Interview Guide
Database administrators (DBAs) manage, optimize, and secure an organization's database systems. They handle performance tuning, backup and recovery, capacity planning, and ensure data integrity across production environments running databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and SQL Server.
Salary Range
| Level | Salary Range |
|---|---|
Key Skills
Common Interview Questions
Performance
Indexing
Reliability
Capacity Planning
Replication
Migration
A Day in the Life
Your morning begins with reviewing overnight monitoring alerts and checking replication lag across database clusters. You investigate a slow query flagged by the application team, adding a composite index that brings it back to acceptable performance. After lunch, you test the disaster recovery procedure by performing a point-in-time recovery on a staging cluster, then update the capacity forecast for next quarter based on current growth trends.
Career Path
Junior DBA
Database Administrator
Senior DBA
Staff DBA / Database Architect
Principal Database Engineer / Director of Data Infrastructure
Related Roles
Data Engineer
{ "junior": "$85,000 - $115,000", "mid": "$120,000 - $170,000", "senior": "$170,000 - $240,000" } avg. salary
Backend Engineer
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Site Reliability Engineer
{ "junior": "$95,000 - $125,000", "mid": "$130,000 - $180,000", "senior": "$180,000 - $260,000" } avg. salary
Cloud Architect
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