Database Platform Manager

The technical roadmap for the estate. We want someone genuinely interested in emerging database technologies who evaluates them on merit and can articulate the pros and cons clearly to a technical or non-technical audience

Own the strategy and delivery of the consolidation and modernisation programme across the estate, including sequencing, risk and making the case to the business

Shape the direction of the platform and the team around two priorities, high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making the trade-offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus behind them

Target architecture on GCP: where self-managed instances remain right and where managed and cloud-native services earn their place

Standards for database design, performance, high availability and disaster recovery, patching, and backup and recovery

Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance and query tuning, replication and failover, major incident response and post-incident review

Automation, infrastructure as code and database CI/CD, with everything in GitHub under proper change management, so routine change scales without scaling headcount

Line management of the DBA team across the UK and India: 1:1s, development, performance, hiring and onboarding

The L1/L2/L3 operating model and the rotas that support it, including on-call, run sustainably and held as data rather than tribal knowledge

Growing technical depth across the team through design review, pairing and deliberate development

Working as a close peer to the Principal Data Reliability Engineer, with both teams operating together on automation, reliability and incident response

Capacity and allocation planning for the team, and the trade-offs when demand exceeds supply

Weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership, and representing the platform in cross-functional forums

Agreeing modernisation priorities with stakeholders and sequencing them realistically alongside run commitments

Input into GCP cost forecasting and run-rate, and day-to-day management of vendor and cloud partner relationships

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: able to write and optimise complex queries and diagnose execution plans first-hand

Google Cloud Platform: production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), and a clear view of the trade-offs between self-managed and managed services

On-premise infrastructure: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, and the realities of a hybrid estate

GitHub, CI/CD and change management: everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, and a disciplined approach to change control in a production environment

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 a clear, evidence-based case to technical and non-technical stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost

Line management in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context

Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership

Couchbase or comparable NoSQL / document-store experience

CockroachDB or other distributed SQL platforms

Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash

Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate

Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent

Kafka or streaming platforms

Managing distributed or offshore teams

Regulated or high-availability environments [sector, if relevant]

You are curious about technology and restless with the status quo. You keep an eye on where the database world is going, form a view, and are willing to argue for change when the current approach has stopped being the right one

You challenge constructively. You are comfortable disagreeing with a decision, including one of your own, and you do it with evidence and without making it personal

You give people room to grow. We have a culture that supports people stretching beyond their job description, and you create that space for your team rather than defending boundaries

You are pragmatic about trade-offs. You can hold resilience, cost and delivery pressure in the same conversation and make a defensible call rather than an idealistic one

You communicate well with people who are not database engineers. You can take a complex technical trade-off and make it land with a stakeholder who needs to make a decision, not a lecture

You lead from the front. You are hands-on by instinct, and your team see you in the detail with them, particularly when things are going wrong

You take on-call seriously as a human problem, not just a rota. Sustainable, fairly shared, and something people are supported through

THG Ingenuity is proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you are invited to interview, please let us know if there are any reasonable adjustments we can make to the recruitment process that will enable you to perform to the best of your ability.

THG Ingenuity is committed to creating a diverse & inclusive environment and hence welcomes applications from all sections of the community.

Because of the high volumes of applications our opportunities attract, it sometimes takes us time to review and consider them all. We endeavour to respond to every application we receive within 14 days. If you haven't heard from us within that time frame or should you have any specific questions about this or other applications for positions at THG Ingenuity please contact one of our Talent team to discuss further.