Senior Database Administrator

Senior DBA – Database Platform

Role Overview

As a Senior Database Administrator within the Database Platform team, you will design, build, and operate the organisation's database infrastructure platform. You will play a key role in the evolution of our database architecture, helping define standards, tooling, and best practices for how databases are deployed, managed, and operated across the organisation.

The Database Platform underpins critical services across the engineering organisation and must deliver high levels of reliability, scalability, and automation. The team follows a platform engineering approach, focusing on automation, infrastructure-as-code, and repeatable platform builds to minimise manual operational work and improve system reliability.The platform consists of a large estate of SQL Server and PostgreSQL database clusters, alongside additional technologies such as Couchbase and CockroachDB. High availability is central to the platform design, making extensive use of technologies such as SQL Server Failover Clusters, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, and PostgreSQL physical replication to support highly reliable production systems.

In this role you will work closely with engineering teams to provide database platform expertise and ensure applications are designed and operated in a way that supports performance, scalability, and reliability. You will manage database infrastructure across both on-premise environments and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).The role participates in a DBA on-call rotation and may require out-of-hours work to support deployments, maintenance activities, or operational incidents.

Key Responsibilities

Database Administration

Deploy, configure, maintain, and upgrade SQL Server and PostgreSQL database environments across development, testing, and production. Ensure database servers are securely configured, patched, and compliant with operational standards.Manage backup, restore, and maintenance strategies to ensure data protection and availability.

Cloud Database Deployments

Deploy and manage database environments within Google Cloud Platform.

Provision database servers using Compute Engine virtual machines or managed services such as Cloud SQL where appropriate. Configure networking, storage, and security controls for cloud-hosted database systems. Implement backup, replication, and disaster recovery strategies in cloud environments.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Design and maintain high availability and disaster recovery solutions. Configure and support replication technologies including transactional replication where required. Perform regular testing of backup and recovery procedures.

Monitoring and Observability

Maintain monitoring and alerting using enterprise monitoring tools such as Prometheus, Grafana and other Database monitoring tooling. Ensure proactive monitoring of database performance and availability. Provide operational expertise and platform guidance across engineering teams.

Participate in the DBA on-call rota supporting production systems. Perform out-of-hours deployments or maintenance activities when required.

Performance Optimisation

Identify and resolve database performance issues. Work with development teams to optimise queries, indexing strategies, and schema design.

Automation and Platform Tooling

Develop automation and tooling to support database provisioning, patching, backup management, and routine maintenance tasks, reducing manual operational work and improving platform consistency. Maintain automation scripts, configuration, and operational tooling in version-controlled repositories using standard engineering workflows. Apply software engineering practices such as version control, code review, and CI/CD to database automation and operational tooling.

Governance and Collaboration

Contribute to the development and maintenance of database standards and procedures.

Maintain database security, access control, and auditing practices.Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure database platforms support application performance and reliability.

Skills and Experience

Database Technologies

Strong administration experience with SQL Server and PostgreSQL in production environments.

Experience supporting additional database platforms such as Couchbase is beneficial.

Cloud Platforms

Experience deploying and managing database infrastructure in Google Cloud Platform.

Familiarity with services such as Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking configuration, and IAM.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Experience designing and supporting high availability and disaster recovery architectures.

Experience with SQL Server high availability technologies such as AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Clustering. Knowledge of replication technologies including transactional replication.

Monitoring and Operations

Experience implementing monitoring and alerting using tools such as SQL Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar database observability platforms.

Database Operations

Experience with database installation, configuration, patching, and upgrades.

Strong understanding of backup and recovery processes. Knowledge of database security best practices.

Automation and Tooling

Experience scripting or automating database administration tasks using tools such as PowerShell, Python, or similar scripting environments, with a focus on reducing manual operational work. Familiarity with source control systems such as Git.

Communication

Strong written and verbal communication skills. Ability to collaborate effectively with engineering and infrastructure teams.

What We're Looking For

• Engineers who enjoy building reliable shared infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
• A strong focus on automation and reducing manual operational work.
• A collaborative mindset when working with application developers and platform teams.
• A passion for improving reliability, performance, and operational efficiency.