Oracle DBA Job Description Template 2026

Last updated: September 15, 2026

By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1

An Oracle DBA job description should name the Oracle Database edition and version you license, say where the databases run, describe the RAC, Data Guard, and backup setup the DBA inherits, and post a base salary range. Mid-level Oracle DBAs earn about $112,000 to $148,000 base in 2026, and senior ones $148,000 to $192,000. Most templates that rank for this query still list 11g and 12c and never mention the edition, which is the first detail an experienced candidate checks.

The best candidate on an Oracle DBA search I ran in April asked one question on her first phone screen. Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition 2? The IT director on the call did not know.

He found out that afternoon. The company, a regional distributor in Ontario, California, ran two production databases on Oracle 19c Standard Edition 2, on VMware, behind a warehouse management system and fourteen years of order history. Their standby was a shell script, written by a DBA who had retired in January, that copied archived redo logs every fifteen minutes to a second server in the Reno warehouse. The posting, assembled from an online template and the retiree’s old job description, asked for Oracle RAC, Data Guard, Exadata, GoldenGate, Oracle 12c OCP certification, and experience across 11g through 19c. Standard Edition 2 cannot run RAC. It cannot run Data Guard either.

So the posting had described a bank. It drew 140 applicants in three weeks, and most of them were cluster DBAs from exactly that kind of shop. The candidate who asked about the edition had spent six years on Exadata at a lender in downtown Los Angeles. She withdrew the next morning. Very polite about it.

The rewrite took an hour. It named Standard Edition 2, the two databases, the log-shipping script, and a plan to replace that script with a supported standby product within the year. RAC, Exadata, and GoldenGate came out entirely. Applications fell to 38. The distributor hired a DBA who had been running an almost identical setup at a food manufacturer in Riverside, at $138,000, twenty-three days after the new version went up.

My own angle, so you can weigh what follows. I manage recruiting at KORE1, and our Oracle DBA staffing desk is paid when an Oracle seat fills through us, so a posting strong enough to fill on its own is a fee we never collect. I would rather you had the good posting anyway. Stalled Oracle searches reach me often enough that I can usually point to the sentence that stalled them, and it is rarely a sentence about skills. Skills are the easy part.

What an Oracle DBA Owns Day to Day

An Oracle database administrator keeps an organization’s Oracle databases available, recoverable, fast, and secure. In practice that is a lot of unglamorous work. Patching, every quarter. RMAN backups, plus the restores that prove those backups are real. RAC or Data Guard where the license allows it, then SQL and memory tuning, privileged access, and an upgrade plan that starts well before a support date forces the issue.

Every generic database administrator posting covers some version of that list. For PostgreSQL or SQL Server, or a seat split across several engines, start from our database administrator job description template instead. What makes an Oracle posting its own document is that the job changes shape around four facts most hiring managers can find in ten minutes and rarely write down. Which edition. Which version. Where the databases physically run. And how much of the estate the new person inherits on day one.

The rest of this page takes those one at a time, then hands you a template with the gaps marked.

Standard Edition 2 Cannot Run RAC or Data Guard

Oracle’s Database 19c Licensing Information User Manual lays out which features each edition includes, and it reads uncomfortably like the requirements section of a typical Oracle DBA posting. Several of those requirements are not available on Standard Edition 2 at all. A few more cost extra even on Enterprise Edition.

That last pair catches Enterprise Edition shops too. The manual says any method of reaching Diagnostics Pack functionality, including querying the underlying data directly, requires the license. A DBA who pulls an AWR report on a database that never bought the pack has created an audit finding, not a tuning win. Oracle’s auditors will count it. I have watched a posting ask for “expert AWR and ASH analysis” at a company that had licensed neither.

None of this is a reason to feel bad about Standard Edition 2. Plenty of well-run companies choose it on purpose, because the license costs a fraction of Enterprise Edition and two or three databases do not need a cluster. The DBA who thrives there is a specific person. Comfortable with manual recovery steps. Good with scripts. Unbothered by the missing high-availability tooling, and often quietly proud of what they built without it. For the standby, those shops generally run scripted log shipping or a third-party product like Dbvisit StandbyMP, and a candidate who has kept either one healthy is a better fit than a Data Guard specialist who has never had to.

23ai Is Now 26ai, and a Posting Should Say So

Version is the second fact. It dates a posting faster than anything else on it.

Oracle Database 19c is where most production estates still sit. Under Oracle’s Lifetime Support Policy, Premier Support for 19c runs through December 31, 2029, and Extended Support through December 31, 2032. The next long-term release was called Oracle Database 23ai until October 2025, when Oracle renamed it Oracle AI Database 26ai. Existing 23ai databases became 26ai by applying the October 2025 Release Update, version 23.26.0, with no upgrade and no application recertification, according to Mike Dietrich, who runs product management for database upgrades at Oracle. A 2026 posting that asks for “Oracle 23c” reads like it was written in 2023. Candidates notice.

The upgrade detail matters more than the name. A 19c database built on the older non-CDB architecture has to become a pluggable database on its way to 26ai, since 26ai supports only the multitenant architecture. That is a project with its own testing, its own rollback plan, and usually its own weekend. Sometimes three. If that upgrade is why you are hiring, it belongs in the first paragraph with a target quarter beside it, and the requirements should ask for someone who has converted a non-CDB database to a PDB in production rather than someone with “upgrade experience.”

Then there is patching. Oracle still ships its quarterly Critical Patch Updates in January, April, July, and October, and in 2026 it began adding smaller monthly Critical Security Patch Updates in the months between. “Apply patches as needed” tells a candidate nothing. “We apply each quarterly Release Update to test within two weeks and to production within six” tells them how the calendar actually works, and roughly how many of their weekends it will take.

RDS, OCI, or Exadata in the Basement

Where the databases run is the third fact, and there are more honest answers to it than there were three years ago.

• On premises, on VMware or bare metal. Still most of the estates I recruit for, and the DBA owns the host, the storage layout, and the operating system patching conversation.
• Exadata in your own data center, which is a narrower pool and a different one.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, through Base Database Service, Exadata Database Service, or Autonomous Database.
• Inside another cloud. Oracle Database@Azure has been generally available since December 2023, Oracle Database@AWS followed in July 2025, and Oracle Database@Google Cloud sits alongside both.
• Amazon RDS for Oracle.

That last one surprises people. According to AWS documentation, the DBA role on RDS for Oracle does not include ALTER SYSTEM, ALTER DATABASE, or GRANT ANY PRIVILEGE, and the SYS and SYSTEM accounts are off limits. A DBA who spent ten years on self-managed RAC can do the RDS job. Some of them hate it. They reach for a parameter change out of habit, find the door locked, and start returning recruiter calls by spring. The reverse fails as well, since an engineer who has only worked inside RDS has never had to rebuild a control file or replace a failed ASM disk in the middle of the night.

One wrinkle worth putting in writing if you are moving to OCI. The same licensing manual lists the Diagnostics Pack and Tuning Pack as included with Base Database Service Enterprise Edition and with Exadata Database Service, so a team that tuned half blind on premises may suddenly have AWR and ASH to work with. Say so. Performance-minded DBAs notice that sentence.

The Estate, in Numbers

A figure screens better than an adjective. Picture two candidates. One reads “manage Oracle databases in a high-availability environment” and learns nothing. The other reads “31 databases across two RAC clusters, a physical standby in Phoenix, the largest at 4.2 terabytes, one DBA today,” and she can already see most Tuesdays of the job, the bad ones included.

These are the counts I ask a hiring manager for before we write a word:

• Production databases, plus pluggable databases if you run multitenant
• The largest database by size
• RAC nodes, if there are any
• Standbys, where they sit, and the date of the last failover anyone actually ran
• How recoveries get proven. A scheduled restore to separate hardware counts. A backup job that emails “completed” does not.
• How far production trails the current Release Update today
• Who else carries the pager, and how often this person will

One more split belongs near the top. A core Oracle DBA and an Oracle E-Business Suite Apps DBA share a title and not much else. Same three letters. The Apps DBA patches the EBS technology stack, looks after concurrent managers, and runs clones for the functional team, while the core DBA handles the database underneath all of it. Mix them up and someone spends the spring doing the half of the job they were not hired for. If EBS is in your estate, the Apps DBA seat is one we recruit through Oracle EBS consultant staffing. And if the new person will also write and own PL/SQL packages, say it plainly, because Oracle developers and Oracle DBAs apply to different postings.

Oracle 12c OCP Is Not a 2026 Requirement

The template sitting near the top of this search asks for proficiency across 11g, 12c, 18c, and 19c. Oracle 12c OCP still turns up as a hard requirement on live postings, too. Both tell an experienced candidate the requirements were copied rather than written. They are usually right.

Oracle’s newest database administration credentials on Oracle University are the Oracle AI Database Administration Associate, exam 1Z0-182, and the Oracle AI Database Administration Professional, exam 1Z0-183. Plenty of excellent 19c DBAs hold the Oracle Database Administration 2019 Certified Professional instead, or an older OCP they never renewed, or nothing. List a current credential as preferred. Keep it off the required list. The DBA who has kept a two-site estate alive for eight years without sitting an exam is exactly the person a hard certification filter throws away.

Anchor Pay to the Oracle Slice

This is the number that sinks Oracle budgets. The 2025 median across all DBAs was $104,620, according to O*NET OnLine, which also expects the occupation to shrink slightly by 2034 while still producing about 3,800 openings a year. Every platform is inside that figure. A Microsoft Access database at a county office, a SQL Server shop at a regional hospital, a production RAC estate at a bank. An Oracle offer built on $104,620 does not survive a first call with someone who runs RAC. Not even close.

The bands below match our Oracle DBA salary guide, which splits them further by metro, specialty premium, and contract rate.

Senior contract Oracle DBAs on W-2 run roughly $95 to $142 an hour. Coastal metros sit higher, and a clearance requirement in the Washington, D.C. area pushes past the top of the senior band.

Put the range in the posting. Virginia began requiring a wage or salary range on job postings from employers of every size on July 1, 2026, and Maine followed on July 29 for employers with ten or more employees, bringing the total to 16 states plus the District of Columbia, per Bradley Arant Boult Cummings. Remote postings that people in those states can apply to often count as well, so check with counsel. The practical reason is simpler than the legal one. Senior Oracle DBAs hear from recruiters all the time, and the messages with no number in them go unanswered. For a quick read on your figure in your own metro, try our salary benchmark assistant.

Oracle DBA Job Description Template

Replace the bracketed parts with your own facts. Some lines are followed by a bracketed note meant for you rather than for candidates, so delete those before anything goes live. A bracket nobody on the team can fill is usually a question for whoever manages the Oracle license agreement.

Job Title

[Oracle Database Administrator / Senior Oracle DBA, RAC and Data Guard / Oracle DBA, 19c to 26ai Upgrade / Oracle DBA, Amazon RDS] [Keep “Oracle DBA” or “Oracle Database Administrator” in the title, since that is what people search for. The qualifier after the comma is what makes the right person stop scrolling.]

About the Estate

[Company] is hiring an Oracle DBA [in city, state / remote within the United States]. We run [number] production Oracle databases on [Oracle Database 19c / Oracle AI Database 26ai], [Enterprise Edition with RAC and Data Guard / Enterprise Edition, single instance / Standard Edition 2], hosted [on premises on VMware / on Exadata / on OCI / on Oracle Database@Azure / on Amazon RDS for Oracle]. The largest is [size], and it supports [the system the business cannot lose: order management / claims / the general ledger / Oracle E-Business Suite]. Our standby is [a physical standby in city / Dbvisit StandbyMP / a scripted log-shipping job we plan to replace / not built yet]. This role reports to [title] and works most closely with [infrastructure / the application team / the EBS functional team].

The Work

• RMAN backups across all [number] databases, with a restore to [separate hardware / a test environment] every [month / quarter] to prove they work
• Quarterly Release Updates, applied to test within [N] weeks and to production within [N]
• [Our upgrade from 19c to 26ai, including converting non-CDB databases to pluggable databases, targeted for [quarter and year]]
• Performance work on [the system that slows down at month-end], using [AWR and ASH / Statspack and SQL trace, since we do not license the Diagnostics Pack]
• Privileged access, auditing, and [Transparent Data Encryption / wallet management] for our [SOX / HIPAA / PCI DSS] scope
• On-call one week in [N], covering [production outages only / failed backups and standby lag as well] [Put the real ratio here, not in the offer letter.]

Must Have

• [5+] years administering production Oracle databases, with at least [2] on [19c / the edition we run]
• RMAN backup and recovery, including a real restore you performed and can walk us through
• [RAC and Data Guard on Enterprise Edition / Standby and recovery work on Standard Edition 2 without Data Guard]
• SQL and PL/SQL well enough to read an execution plan and find the statement behind a slowdown
• Shell scripting on [Oracle Linux / Red Hat Enterprise Linux / AIX]

Helps, but Not Required

• A 19c to 26ai upgrade, or a non-CDB to PDB conversion, completed in production
• [Exadata / OCI / Oracle Database@Azure / Amazon RDS for Oracle], if that is where we are headed
• GoldenGate, only if [the replication or migration project] is real and funded
• Oracle AI Database Administration Professional or Oracle Database Administration 2019 Certified Professional
• Working knowledge of Oracle licensing, including which options and packs we pay for

How We Interview

[A 30-minute call with the IT manager. An hour with our current DBA or a senior contractor about a recovery you ran and an outage you worked. Forty-five minutes reading an execution plan or a performance report together. A final conversation about on-call and the upgrade timeline.] [Say how long the whole process takes. Oracle DBAs with real production experience are usually employed and have little patience for a six-round loop.]

Pay, Location, and On-Call

Base salary of [$148,000 to $192,000], plus [bonus], [on-call stipend], and [benefits]. [Onsite in city / in the office N days weekly / remote from anywhere in the United States.] [If the band moves for RAC, Exadata, or a clearance, say how far.]

With the posting live, our Oracle DBA interview questions give a panel thirty questions and two scenarios to run, and our guide to hiring Oracle DBAs covers sourcing and how quickly good candidates come off the market.

Six Oracle Questions IT Directors Raise

Does an Oracle DBA posting really need to be different from a general DBA posting?

An Oracle DBA posting needs its own version, because RAC, Data Guard, RMAN, ASM, and Oracle’s edition and licensing rules have no direct equivalent on SQL Server or PostgreSQL, and experienced Oracle candidates look for those details first.

When one DBA covers Oracle alongside other engines, lead with the engine holding the data the business cannot lose, and describe the rest in a sentence. Mixed estates tied to support deadlines are what our database administrator staffing page is built around.

We run Standard Edition 2. Should Data Guard be anywhere on the posting?

Leave Data Guard off a Standard Edition 2 posting, since Data Guard requires Enterprise Edition, and describe the standby you actually run instead.

Scripted archive log shipping, Dbvisit StandbyMP, or nothing yet are all honest answers, and each attracts a slightly different candidate. The distributor in Ontario had the first one. Replacing it became their new DBA’s first real project, which is worth mentioning in a posting because some candidates want exactly that kind of problem and will say so on the first call.

Our Oracle databases are on Amazon RDS. Do we still need a DBA?

Most companies on Amazon RDS for Oracle still need a DBA, just a narrower one, because RDS runs the host and backup mechanics while withholding SYS access and ALTER SYSTEM.

What remains is schema design, SQL performance, security reviews, cost, and whatever migration comes next. Post it as that job. Some DBAs prefer that version.

Should a 19c to 26ai upgrade be a contract role?

$95 to $142 an hour on W-2 is the usual senior contract Oracle DBA rate, and for an upgrade with a fixed end date that often costs less than adding a permanent head.

The math shifts if the same person will run the estate afterward. A contractor who converts every non-CDB database and then leaves takes a lot of knowledge out the door with them, so either pair that contractor with your permanent DBA from the first week or structure the role as contract-to-hire. When the upgrade is one piece of a steady-state seat, a direct hire search is the cleaner route.

Is it fair to require an Oracle certification?

Listing an Oracle certification as preferred rather than required is fairer, because many strong production DBAs never renewed an older OCP or never sat the exam at all.

Junior seats are the exception. There, a certification is one of the few signals a resume can show, and requiring one is reasonable.

How much Oracle licensing should the DBA understand?

An Oracle DBA should know which options and packs the company pays for, since using AWR, ASH, or ADDM without a Diagnostics Pack license counts as usage.

DBAs do not negotiate Oracle contracts, and the posting should not pretend they will. Knowing that a new RAC node or a cloned test database carries license consequences is another matter. By the time an audit letter arrives, the DBA is usually the one person in the building who could have seen it coming, and the posting is a fair place to say you expect them to.

Start the Posting With the License Agreement Open

The distributor in Ontario did not need a different candidate pool in April. They needed three words near the top of the posting, Standard Edition 2, and one honest sentence about a shell script. The people who could do the job were in the market the whole time. The posting had been written for somebody else.

Work in that order. Pull the license agreement and find the edition and the options. Check the version and its support date. Write down where the databases run, then count them, then the standbys, then who shares the pager. Skills come after all of that, and by then most of the list is obvious, because the estate has already decided what matters.

Across IT roles we average 17 days to hire, and Oracle searches on our desk run close to that when those facts are settled up front, then drag when the edition turns up in week four. Week four happens a lot. Our twelve-month retention on placements is 92 percent, and KORE1 has been recruiting technology people since 2005. We watch that figure hardest on database seats. A DBA who leaves takes the undocumented half of the estate along. Send us the draft before it posts, or the Oracle search that has gone quiet, and our Oracle recruiters will tell you what they would change. The same team works across the wider data tier through KORE1 IT staffing services.