Senior Snowflake DBA

Job description

**Career Area:** Technology, Digital and Data **Job Description:** **Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc.** When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it. **Job Summary:** The Senior Snowflake DBA is responsible for the end-to-end design, implementation, administration, and optimization of enterprise Snowflake cloud data platform environments. This role serves as the technical authority on Snowflake architecture, security, performance tuning, and operational excellence across the organization. The individual will lead strategic initiatives to modernize data infrastructure, establish governance frameworks, and ensure high availability and disaster recovery for mission-critical data workloads. Acting as a bridge between business stakeholders and technical teams, this role translates complex data requirements into scalable, cost-effective Snowflake solutions that support analytics, machine learning, and real-time data processing needs. The individual will also drive innovation by evaluating emerging Snowflake capabilities, establishing best practices and standards, mentoring cross-functional teams, and ensuring the platform evolves to meet growing organizational demands while maintaining strict security, compliance, and cost governance. **What You Will Do:** **Architecture & Design:** - Design and implement scalable Snowflake data architectures supporting enterprise analytics, data science, and operational workloads - Define multi-account strategies, database structures, schema designs, and data sharing topologies - Establish architectural standards for data modeling, storage optimization, and compute resource allocation - Evaluate and implement features such as Iceberg tables, dynamic tables, hybrid tables, and Snowpark **Database Administration:** - Manage Snowflake account configurations, warehouse sizing, and resource monitors - Implement and maintain data replication, failover, and disaster recovery strategies - Monitor and optimize query performance, clustering keys, materialized views, and search optimization - Manage data lifecycle including Time Travel, Fail-safe, storage lifecycle policies, and data retention **Security & Governance:** - Design and enforce RBAC models, network policies, and authentication mechanisms (SSO, MFA, key-pair) - Implement data governance using masking policies, row access policies, object tagging, and classification - Conduct access reviews, privilege audits, and compliance reporting - Manage Tri-Secret Secure, customer-managed keys, and encryption standards - Operations & Cost Management: - Establish monitoring, alerting, and incident response procedures - Optimize credit consumption through warehouse scheduling, auto-suspend tuning, and workload analysis - Implement resource monitors, budgets, and chargeback models - Automate administrative tasks using Snowflake Tasks, Streams, and stored procedures **Collaboration & Leadership:** - Partner with data engineering, analytics, and application teams on Snowflake best practices - Mentor junior DBAs and engineers on Snowflake capabilities and patterns - Evaluate new Snowflake features and drive adoption where beneficial - Maintain documentation for architecture decisions, runbooks, and operational procedures **Qlik Replicate:** - Design and implement CDC and full-load replication tasks using Qlik Replicate to ingest data from diverse source systems into Snowflake - Configure and optimize Qlik Replicate endpoints, including source (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, mainframe) and target (Snowflake) connections - Monitor replication task health, latency, and throughput; resolve errors related to DDL changes, LOB handling, and network interruptions - Manage transformation rules, table filters, and column mappings within Qlik Replicate to align source data with Snowflake target schemas - Coordinate with source system teams to assess replication impact and implement log-based CDC with minimal overhead - Automate Qlik Replicate task orchestration and integrate with broader ETL/ELT workflows and scheduling systems **Technical Environment** - Snowflake (Enterprise or Business Critical edition) - Qlik Replicate - ETL/ELT tools (dbt, Matillion, Snaplogic) - Monitoring (Snowflake Account Usage, Query History, third-party observability) - Version control and CI/CD (Git, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) **What You Have:** **Required Qualifications:** - 8+ years of database administration experience, with 4+ years focused on Snowflake - Deep expertise in Snowflake architecture (micro-partitions, virtual warehouses, metadata layer, services layer) - Strong SQL proficiency and experience with query optimization - Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Schema change, or similar) for Snowflake deployments - Knowledge of data modeling (dimensional, Data Vault, ELT patterns) - Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS or Azure) and their integration with Snowflake **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience with Snowflake Native Apps, Cortex AI, or Snowpark - Background in CI/CD pipelines for database change management - Experience with data mesh or data product architectures - Proficiency in Python or JavaScript for Snowflake scripting and automation - 3+ years of experience with Qlik Replicate (formerly Attunity Replicate) for enterprise data replication - Hands-on expertise configuring CDC from major databases (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, SAP) to cloud targets - Understanding of transaction log reading and supplemental logging - Experience troubleshooting replication latency, data drift, and schema evolution