Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty database administration role supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs' massive ICAM modernization initiative. You will be directly responsible for keeping mission-critical identity, credential, and access management platforms online and performing at scale. If you enjoy high-stakes environments where uptime, disaster recovery, and robust security protocols dictate your daily routine, this federal-adjacent gig offers a chance to make a real infrastructure impact.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Your day-to-day will revolve around managing, monitoring, and tuning both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle database instances that power enterprise Identity Governance, Privileged Access Management, and Master Person Index platforms. You are the safety net—setting up and rigorously testing backup and restore operations, replication pipelines, and full disaster recovery strategies. When performance bottlenecks pop up or an availability drop threatens the IGA/PAM workloads, you'll be the one diving into execution plans, indexing strategies, and system logs to fix the root cause before anyone blinks.
The Core Tech Stack
You need absolute fluency in Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database Administration because these two powerhouses form the backbone of the VA's ecosystem. Beyond just writing queries, you must live and breathe high availability and disaster recovery architectures like Always On Availability Groups, mirroring, clustering, and Oracle Data Guard. Prior exposure to Identity and Access Management (IAM) platforms or enterprise tools like IGA, PAM, and MPI will immediately set you apart since you'll be dealing with complex schema designs and strict compliance constraints.
Interview Expectations
The technical panel is going to test your mettle on failure scenarios, so expect deep-dive questions around disaster recovery. They will likely ask you to walk through how you would architect a cross-site HA/DR solution for a hybrid Microsoft SQL and Oracle environment with near-zero RPO and RTO, probing specifically into how you handle split-brain scenarios and data replication lag. They aren't just looking for textbook definitions; they want to hear war stories about how you diagnosed obscure locking issues or handled a botched transaction log backup in a production environment at 2 AM.
Application Advice
Federal and government-adjacent tech roles run on strict compliance and specific keyword matching, so make sure your resume explicitly highlights 'Microsoft SQL Server', 'Oracle DBA', 'High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HA/DR)', and 'Identity and Access Management'. Since a Secret Clearance is a hard requirement, put your clearance status right at the top of the page so it's impossible to miss. Weave your specific metric-driven achievements around uptime percentages, database sizing, and disaster recovery drill success into your bullet points to bypass the ATS and catch the hiring manager's eye.