Senior Lead Associate - Database

• The Database Level 3 Engineer serves as the principal technical authority responsible for the strategic evolution, optimisation, governance, and operational maturity of the organisation's database platforms across on-premises and cloud environments. Reporting to the Hosting Service Owner, the role drives platform resilience, performance optimisation, security enhancement, recoverability assurance, and technology lifecycle management to ensure database services remain robust, scalable, and aligned with business and technology priorities.
• The role provides technical leadership across the database estate, leading complex engineering initiatives, platform modernisation programmes, and risk reduction activities that improve database reliability, operational effectiveness, and long-term sustainability. Through proactive assessment of platform health, technical debt, security posture, capacity demands, and service performance trends, the Database Level 3 Engineer develops and delivers strategic improvement roadmaps that strengthen overall service maturity.
• Working closely with Architecture, Application Development, Hosting, Cloud, Cyber Security, Risk, and Service Management teams, the role translates business, operational, and security requirements into scalable database standards, engineering patterns, governance controls, and target-state platform designs. The position is accountable for establishing engineering best practices, defining operational standards, and ensuring database technologies are deployed, maintained, and evolved in accordance with enterprise architecture and governance principles.
• The Database Level 3 Engineer acts as the senior technical advisor and escalation authority for complex platform challenges, providing expert guidance on database architecture, performance engineering, high availability, disaster recovery, automation, and security controls. The role mentors engineering teams, strengthens technical capability across the function, and ensures service improvements are measurable, governed, and successfully adopted into operational practice.
• Success in the role is measured through improvements in database service reliability, performance, security, automation adoption, operational maturity, audit readiness, technical debt reduction, and infrastructure modernisation rather than through the execution of routine administrative or operational support activities.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the principal technical authority for enterprise database platforms, providing strategic leadership and expert guidance on complex database technologies, resilience architectures, recoverability frameworks, and performance optimisation initiatives across hybrid environments.
• Establish and govern database engineering standards, reference architectures, configuration baselines, security controls, lifecycle strategies, operational acceptance criteria, and supportability requirements that drive consistency, scalability, and service maturity.
• Lead database transformation and modernisation programmes, including platform upgrades, cloud adoption initiatives, consolidation activities, migrations, lifecycle refresh programmes, and technology retirement strategies, ensuring successful implementation and operational readiness.
• Design, optimise, and continuously improve high-availability, disaster recovery, replication, clustering, and data protection capabilities to strengthen service resilience and align with business continuity objectives.

• Drive advanced database performance engineering initiatives through analysis of workload characteristics, execution plans, indexing strategies, resource utilisation, concurrency patterns, telemetry insights, and operational trends, delivering sustainable improvements in platform efficiency and scalability.
• Lead the identification and remediation of technical debt across the database estate, including ageing platform versions, vulnerability exposure, configuration drift, unsupported technologies, security weaknesses, and operational control deficiencies.
• Own the resolution of systemic database risks and complex technical challenges by leading root cause elimination initiatives, implementing sustainable corrective actions, and improving long-term platform stability and supportability.

• Define and implement secure database operating models that strengthen privileged access governance, service-account management, authentication frameworks, encryption controls, audit capabilities, secrets management, and regulatory compliance requirements.
• Partner with Cyber Security, Risk, and Governance functions to evaluate platform risks, improve control effectiveness, address audit findings, and strengthen the organisation's overall database security posture.
• Establish robust compliance and assurance frameworks through the development of evidence-based controls, monitoring standards, validation processes, and measurable security and operational performance indicators.

• Drive the adoption of automation, orchestration, and engineering-led operational improvements that enhance consistency, reduce manual effort, accelerate remediation activities, and improve service scalability.
• Leverage service intelligence, operational telemetry, vulnerability data, capacity forecasts, audit outcomes, and performance metrics to develop prioritised improvement roadmaps and measurable service enhancement programmes.
• Enhance database observability through the continual improvement of monitoring capabilities, alert quality, capacity modelling, service-health reporting, and operational analytics that support proactive management and informed decision-making.

• Provide technical leadership during critical service events by directing investigation activities, validating recovery strategies, assuring service restoration outcomes, and translating lessons learned into long-term engineering improvements.
• Provide technical assurance for application onboarding, database design reviews, release planning, schema governance, and non-functional requirement assessments, ensuring solutions meet performance, resilience, security, and operational standards.
• Develop and maintain engineering knowledge frameworks, operational standards, technical procedures, recovery strategies, dependency models, and support documentation that improve organisational capability and service supportability.
• Act as a mentor, coach, and technical advisor for Database Engineering teams, strengthening engineering quality, technical governance, capability development, and knowledge sharing across the service.
• Collaborate with Service Owners, Architecture, Cyber Security, Application, Cloud, Hosting, and third-party partners to ensure infrastructure improvements are governed, measurable, adequately assured, and successfully transitioned into steady-state service ownership.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience. Advanced database, cloud, security or architecture certifications are desirable.
• Experience: 8–11 years in database engineering, database administration, infrastructure engineering or IT operations, including substantial experience as a Level 3 subject-matter expert in a complex enterprise environment. Candidates must demonstrate deep technical expertise across production database platforms, high availability, recovery, security, performance engineering, major upgrades or migrations, automation and lifecycle improvement. Proven experience leading complex remediation and influencing architecture, risk and service decisions is required.
• Expert-level engineering and troubleshooting capability across Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL services and at least one additional enterprise database technology such as PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle.
• Deep knowledge of database internals, query optimisation, execution plans, indexing, statistics, concurrency, locking, wait analysis, memory, CPU, storage and workload management.
• Advanced experience designing and improving high availability, clustering, replication, backup, point-in-time recovery, failover, disaster recovery and resilience testing.
• Strong command of database security architecture, privileged access, identity integration, encryption, auditing, secrets management, hardening, vulnerability remediation and control evidence.
• Advanced scripting and automation capability using SQL, PowerShell and relevant platform tooling, with disciplined source control, testing, deployment and rollback practices.
• Ability to define engineering standards, technical patterns, target-state configurations, lifecycle roadmaps, operational controls and measurable service-improvement plans.
• Strong cloud database engineering knowledge, including service selection, migration approaches, connectivity, identity, backup, monitoring, security, performance and cost considerations.
• Advanced ITSM, problem management and engineering-governance capability, with the ability to lead major incidents, root-cause analysis, technical risk treatment and operational acceptance.
• Ability to communicate complex technical risks and options clearly to service owners, architects, cyber security, application teams, suppliers and senior stakeholders.
• Demonstrable Level 3 or senior database engineering experience supporting business-critical production services in a complex enterprise environment.
• Expert Microsoft SQL Server administration and performance engineering capability, together with strong experience in Azure SQL or another cloud database platform.
• Proven delivery of major upgrades, migrations, high-availability or disaster-recovery improvements, security remediation and automation initiatives.
• Ability to lead complex incident restoration and root-cause analysis, define durable engineering solutions and provide authoritative guidance to Level 1 and Level 2 teams.
• Strong knowledge of database security, lifecycle risk, vulnerability remediation, change governance, documentation and operational acceptance.

• Essential / Strongly Preferred Certifications
• Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
• Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900)
• ITIL 4 Foundation
• Azure Database Administrator Associate or current equivalent
• Desirable Certifications
• Advanced Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle certification
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert or relevant cloud architecture certification
• Security or automation certification relevant to the supported estate