First of all, great post. I've also pondered this topic since I read that tweet from Erin Stellato.

My official title is Data Architect, which aligns well with my primary responsibility in designing, building, and managing the data architecture/infrastructure. I'm also responsible for all the normal DBA functions, and additionally, I also happen to be the most senior SQL developer on the team so I do jump in on projects when needed (fairly often). Some days as the Tableau Administrator, I can be even be seen assisting the BI team with logic flows and data sources on Tableau Server. Not to mention backups, maintenance, and upgrades.

In the first two weeks I came on board I configured the first VPN to the office. Prior to that, most of the server access was available on the public interface. I had also found some issues with security, service accounts, and DNS configuration that needed correcting and I ended up receiving Domain Admin access early on.

After the first year, I was able to replace our outsourced "IT provider" with a competent IT partner who has taken over most of the IT responsibilities since. I'm involved less with the day-to-day IT, but I'm closely involved and leading most of the larger projects. The most recent being our disaster recovery solution and expansion into a second data center. The scope was much larger than just our data infrastructure. No documentation. Lots of applications. You can imagine.

None of the extra stuff is technically my responsibility. My responsibility is to the infrastructure, security, and performance of the data. But, if we need to spin up an API to run some testing or a new VM created, I'd take care of it.

I hope this answers your question Steve. We are out here. Whether I'm a "unicorn" or something else I'm not sure. Like others that responded to Erin's tweet, I am also unsure how common this is. I can imagine this is more likely in smaller companies although they usually leave out the DBA instead of IT.