Managing Engineer - Database & Platform (Hybrid) TLNT1_NI in Belfast

At Allstate, great things happen when our people work together to protect families and their belongings from life's uncertainties. Your role in the team is to lead our Database & Platform Engineering team responsible for on-prem and cloud databases (MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and MongoDB Atlas). You will manage a team of Database Administrators/Platform Engineers who build, operate, and evolve the platform services that enable product teams to ship features safely and quickly. This role combines people leadership, technical ownership of database platform architecture, and hands-on partnering with product and SRE teams to deliver operational excellence.

Key responsibilities

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of Database Administrators / Platform Engineers (hiring, performance reviews, career development, coaching).
• Own the technical roadmap for database platform services (MySQL, Redis, MongoDB on-prem, and MongoDB Atlas), driving improvements in scalability, availability, performance, and cost.
• Lead platform engineering work: installation, configuration, upgrades, automation, backup/restore, patching, capacity planning, and runbooks for production systems.
• Design and implement database architecture and operational patterns (sharding/replication strategies, high availability, disaster recovery, backup retention, and failover).
• Build and improve CI/CD and automation pipelines for database provisioning, schema changes, migrations, and configuration management.
• Partner with product engineering, SRE, security, and cloud teams to define SLAs/SLOs, incident response, root cause analysis, and risk mitigation.
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and observability for database health and performance.
• Drive proactive incident prevention.
• Define and enforce standards, best practices, and governance for database access, security, backups, and compliance.
• Participate in design reviews, capacity planning, and product inception to translate feature requirements into scalable data solutions.
• Lead post-incident reviews and continuous improvement initiatives to reduce mean time to detect and recover.
• Represent the database platform across cross-functional initiatives and influence long-term architecture decisions.

Essential Criteria

• 5+ years total experience in database administration, data platform engineering, or related roles with 3+ years in a people management or technical leadership capacity.
• A minimum of 3+ years of hands-on experience working with MongoDB, including deployment, optimization, and support of production environments.
• Proven experience managing production deployments both on premises and in cloud environments.
• Strong understanding of database internals, replication, sharding, performance tuning, and backup/restore strategies.
• Proven experience designing and building database solutions, including schema design, data modelling, indexing strategies, query optimization, and implementing scalable, highly available data architectures.
• Experience with automation and orchestration tools.
• Familiar with CI/CD concepts and tools used to automate schema migrations and platform changes.
• Strong incident management experience and ability to lead technical incident response.
• Excellent communication skills; ability to partner with vendor, product, SRE, security, and engineering leadership.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience with managed database services (MongoDB Atlas, Amazon RDS, Aurora, Azure, ElastiCache) and hybrid cloud architectures.
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Datadog etc) and log aggregation.
• Knowledge of security and compliance controls relevant to data stores (encryption at rest/in transit, IAM, auditing).
• Experience with large-scale data migrations and cross-region replication.
• Relevant certifications (MongoDB Certified DBA, AWS/Azure/GCP certifications).

Supervisory responsibilities

• Directly manage a team of 4-10 Database Administrators / Platform Engineers.
• Responsible for staffing, performance management, career development, and setting team goals and KPIs.
• Collaborates with hiring managers and senior leadership on resourcing and budget priorities.

Why join us?

Allstate NI is proud to be Allstate's European Digital Centre of Excellence, a hub for innovation and engineering excellence. We're recent winners of Best Place to Work in IT (100+ employees) and Best Use of Cloud Services at the Belfast Telegraph IT Awards, and we've been recognised for our community and sustainability impact with Platinum in the Northern Ireland Environmental Benchmarking Survey. We're a product-driven, cloud-first organisation delivering real outcomes through modern technology, a digital product-centric talent model, and a culture rooted in engineering excellence. Our teams work in cross-functional structures, guided by an outcome-based delivery approach that accelerates speed, agility, and value.

We also invest in you. At Allstate NI, your career growth matters. You'll have access to our Continuous Learning Hub, designed to support skills development and professional advancement through tailored learning paths, certifications, and mentoring opportunities. Whether you're deepening technical expertise or exploring leadership roles, we provide the tools and support to help you thrive.

What do you get in return?

As well as receiving a competitive annual salary, our reward package includes:

• Corporate bonus scheme
• Pension scheme
• Annual performance-related pay reviews
• Life assurance and income protection
• Flexible working options
• Hybrid working
• Private medical and dental insurance
• Access to an employee assistance programme
• Discounted gym membership
• Two paid volunteering days each year
• Cycle to work scheme

Be part of a high-performing, socially responsible organisation where your work has purpose, and your growth is supported every step of the way.