About the Role:

We are seeking a seasoned Lead Database Administrator to take full ownership of our database ecosystem. You will drive reliability, performance, and scalability across multiple database platforms on-premises and cloud while acting as the technical authority and mentor for our infrastructure team.

Key Responsibilities:

Database Administration & Operations:

- Administer and maintain multiple databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis across production, staging, and development environments.

- Monitor database health, performance metrics, query execution plans, and system resources; resolve bottlenecks proactively.

- Design and enforce backup, recovery, replication, clustering, and failover strategies to guarantee high availability.

- Manage schema changes, DDL migrations, and version-controlled deployments in collaboration with engineering teams.

- Define and uphold database security standards including role-based access control, encryption, and audit logging.

Cloud Database Management:

- Administer cloud-managed database services on AWS (RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB), GCP (Cloud SQL, Spanner), or Azure Database platforms.

- Architect cloud-native database solutions with a focus on scalability, resilience, and cost optimisation.

- Lead zero-downtime migrations from on-premises databases to managed cloud services.

- Continuously evaluate emerging cloud database technologies and recommend adoption where appropriate.

Performance Tuning & Capacity Planning:

- Analyse slow queries, index strategies, and execution plans; implement targeted optimisations to meet SLA requirements.

- Conduct regular capacity planning and performance benchmarking across all environments.

- Collaborate with application engineers to review ORM usage and data models for performance at scale.

Leadership & Cross-Functional Collaboration:

- Mentor junior DBAs and serve as the primary technical resource for all database-related decisions.

- Establish and maintain database standards, runbooks, and operational best practices documentation.

- Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for database outages.

- Partner with DevOps to integrate database management into CI/CD pipelines and IaC frameworks (Terraform, Ansible).

Required Qualifications:

- 46 years of hands-on database administration experience across multiple database platforms.

- Deep expertise in two or more of: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, or MS SQL Server.

- Proven experience managing cloud databases on AWS (RDS / Aurora), GCP (Cloud SQL), or Azure.

- Strong SQL proficiency query optimisation, stored procedures, indexing, and execution plan analysis.

- Solid experience with replication, clustering, sharding, and high-availability architectures.

- Proficiency in Linux/Unix environments and shell scripting for automation and operations.

- Sound understanding of database security principles encryption at rest/in transit, RBAC, and compliance.

- Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or cloud-native monitors.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, Ansible) for database provisioning and configuration.

- Knowledge of NoSQL data modelling patterns and distributed database architectures.

- Familiarity with automated schema migration tools such as Flyway or Liquibase in GitOps workflows.

- Relevant certifications: AWS Certified Database Specialty, Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer, or Oracle DBA.

- Prior experience working in a SaaS or high-scale product engineering environment.