Database Administrator (DBA)

Role Purpose

The Database Administrator is responsible for designing, implementing, maintaining and supporting enterprise database platforms, ensuring their availability, performance, security and resilience throughout the database lifecycle.

The role provides technical guidance on database design and architecture and supports the adoption of modern database technologies across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Advise on database design, architecture and technology selection, collaborating with business and application teams to address business requirements.
• Administer relational and cloud-native database platforms.
• Install, configure, upgrade and maintain database environments.
• Support database platform modernisation, including standardised deployments and containerised database solutions where appropriate.
• Monitor database performance, capacity, availability and utilisation.
• Implement and maintain backup, recovery, replication and high-availability solutions.
• Contribute to disaster recovery and business continuity planning, ensuring database resilience and continued operations during disruptions.
• Maintain database security measures, including access controls, encryption and audit requirements.
• Ensure database administration activities comply with security standards, corporate policies and regulatory requirements.
• Investigate and resolve complex database incidents and performance issues.
• Provide expertise in query optimisation, database integration and performance tuning to support application development and deployment.
• Support database patching, upgrades, migrations and lifecycle management.
• Develop automation and scripts for database provisioning, monitoring and administration.
• Support the use of Infrastructure as Code, DevOps tools and CI/CD practices to improve the consistency and efficiency of database delivery and operations.
• Work with development teams to integrate databases into application environments and delivery pipelines.
• Collaborate with application, infrastructure, security and data engineering teams.
• Promote modern database management practices, innovation and knowledge sharing across technical teams.
• Maintain database standards, technical documentation and operating procedures.
• Participate in incident, problem, change and release management processes.

Skills and Experience

• Strong experience administering enterprise database platforms, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
• Strong knowledge of relational database concepts, SQL and database operations.
• Experience designing, implementing and supporting enterprise database architectures, including high-availability and resilient solutions.
• Experience managing database availability, backup, recovery and replication.
• Understanding of performance tuning, capacity management and database troubleshooting.
• Knowledge of database security, identity management and access controls.
• Experience applying security, compliance and operational controls throughout the database lifecycle.
• Experience supporting databases in virtualised, cloud or hybrid environments.
• Experience with modern cloud architectures and, ideally, containerised database deployments or platforms such as OpenShift.
• Familiarity with automation, scripting, monitoring and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines and toolchains would be advantageous.
• Experience developing scripts using technologies such as Python, Bash or PowerShell would be advantageous.
• Understanding of database migrations, upgrades and lifecycle management.
• Experience with cloud-native database services would be advantageous.
• Experience collaborating with business and development teams on database design, architecture and integration.
• Ability to contribute to technology modernisation and support the adoption of new database management practices.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience.
• Typically six to ten years of relevant experience, or demonstrable expertise appropriate to the role.
• Experience coordinating the work of others or contributing to technical projects is desirable.
• Strong understanding of platform reliability, security, resilience and operational excellence.
• Experience participating in incident, problem, change and lifecycle management.
• Ability to document technical solutions and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Commitment to continuous learning, professional development and relevant industry accreditations.
• A collaborative, improvement-focused and automation-oriented approach to engineering.