Database Platform Manager

We are representing a confidential digital commerce technology organization headquartered in Manchester. Our client is seeking a Database Platform Manager to lead their database estate through a period of modernization and strategic transformation.

Responsibilities

Technical Direction

• Define and deliver the technical roadmap for a multi-database estate running on Google Cloud Platform, evaluating emerging database technologies and making clear, evidence-based recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Own the strategy and execution of consolidation and modernization across the database platform, including sequencing, risk management, and business case development
• Balance high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making trade-offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus
• Establish target architecture on GCP, determining where self-managed instances remain appropriate and where managed or cloud-native services add value
• Set standards for database design, performance tuning, high availability, disaster recovery, patching, backup and recovery
• Act as senior escalation point for complex L3 work including performance and query tuning, replication, failover, and major incident response
• Drive automation, infrastructure as code, and database CI/CD practices with everything in GitHub under proper change management

Team Leadership

• Line manage a distributed DBA team across the UK and India, including 1:1s, development planning, performance management, hiring and onboarding
• Maintain the L1/L2/L3 operating model and on-call rotas sustainably, ensuring fair distribution and team support
• Grow technical depth across the team through design reviews, pairing, and deliberate development opportunities
• Collaborate closely with the Data Reliability Engineering team on automation, fleet reliability, and SLOs

Planning and Stakeholder Management

• Manage capacity and allocation planning, making transparent trade-offs when demand exceeds supply
• Provide weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership
• Agree modernization priorities with stakeholders and sequence them realistically alongside run commitments
• Contribute to GCP cost forecasting and manage vendor relationships

What We're Looking For

Essential Skills and Experience

• PostgreSQL (core requirement): Deep, current, hands-on expertise covering performance tuning, replication, high availability and failover, upgrades, backup and point-in-time recovery
• Microsoft SQL Server: Strong administration experience including Always On availability groups, clustering, query tuning and maintenance
• Migration between platforms: Practical experience moving production workloads between database engines, including schema and code conversion, data migration and cutover
• SQL: Ability to write and optimize complex queries and diagnose execution plans first-hand
• Google Cloud Platform: Production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), with a clear view of trade-offs between self-managed and managed services
• On-premise infrastructure: Experience with servers, storage, networking, virtualization, and hybrid estate management
• GitHub, CI/CD and change management: Everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, disciplined approach to change control in production
• 24/7 service ownership: On-call, incident and problem management, SLAs, post-incident review
• Technology evaluation and influence: Assessing new database technologies objectively and making clear, evidence-based cases to stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost
• Line management in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context
• Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership

Desirable Skills

• NoSQL / document-store experience
• Distributed SQL platform experience
• Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash
• Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate
• Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent
• Streaming platform experience
• Managing distributed or offshore teams
• Experience in regulated or high-availability environments

Personal Attributes

• Curious about technology and restless with the status quo—you keep an eye on where the database world is going and are willing to argue for change when appropriate
• Challenge constructively with evidence, without making it personal
• Give people room to grow, creating space for your team to stretch beyond their job descriptions
• Pragmatic about trade-offs, balancing resilience, cost and delivery pressure
• Communicate complex technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Lead from the front, staying hands-on particularly when things go wrong
• Take on-call seriously as a human problem, ensuring it is sustainable and fairly shared

How We Work with You

Candidates apply directly through Get A Job.ai. Our talent team will review your application and conduct an initial screening interview. If there is a strong match, we will submit your profile to our client for consideration. Please do not contact the client directly—all communication should go through Get A Job.ai to ensure a professional and coordinated process.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on experience and qualifications.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment. We welcome applications from all sections of the community and are proud to be a disability-confident recruiter. If you require reasonable adjustments during the interview process, please let us know.