Select your current position
Pick a role and level — we'll show the growth path, skills and gap analysis.
Development path
Junior
0-2 years
Responsibility: Basic database administration. Writing SQL queries. Setting up backups. Performance monitoring. Learning indexes.
Key skills:
Middle
2-5 years
Responsibility: Query optimization. Schema design. Setting up replication. Capacity planning. Migrations. Performance tuning.
Key skills:
Senior
5-8 years
Responsibility: Data architecture. Sharding strategies. Disaster recovery. Multi-master replication. DBMS kernel-level optimization.
Key skills:
Lead / Staff
7-12 years
Responsibility: Database strategy. Choosing DBMS for different tasks. Data modeling standards. Coordination with backend and data teams.
Key skills:
Principal
10+ years
Responsibility: Enterprise data architecture. Multi-DB strategy. Migration planning. Vendor evaluation. Cost optimization.
Key skills:
Gap analysis: skills to develop
To reach the next level you'll need to develop:
Designs CI/CD pipelines from scratch. Configures caching for faster builds. Uses matrix builds for testing across different versions. Sets up deployment pipelines (staging → production). Works with secrets and environment variables.