Senior MySQL Engineer in Newcastle upon Tyne

Partnerize empowers marketers with technology built to discover, engage, and convert audiences at scale, all while maintaining brand safety and control.

Who We Are:

Partnerize is a partnership channel offering scale and automation on a pay‑for‑performance model, delivering operating leverage necessary for brand survival.

Why Join Us?

Our commitment to growing partnerships extends beyond clients. Employees embody our core values and are carefully selected to contribute to our culture and business success. We value talent, expertise, and passion, striving each day to hire and retain the best.

Job Overview

At a pivotal point in our tech progression, we’re looking to grow the technical estate, replace existing systems, and scale and develop the platform. This is an exciting time to join the team.

As a Senior Database Engineer (MySQL) – Databases, you will be part of the Technical Operations team, working with business, development, and IT functions. You will design, build, and implement platform solutions and provide training and support to ensure timely issue resolution.

You should have a keen interest in problem‑solving with experience in networking, Linux systems, and system design. You will support and maintain the network, infrastructure, and deliver projects and processes to keep our services available, scalable, and secure. You’ll be involved in support, project delivery, and maintenance activities.

We’re looking for a Senior Database Engineer – Databases with a desire to learn. It’s more about the person and character than the role. We need people who will get excited about taking us to the next stage of evolution and learning new skills along the way.

As a Senior Database Engineer at Partnerize, You Will:

• Scope the work coming into the Infrastructure Solutions team and delegate to the team members appropriately.
• Provide primary operational support and engineering for multiple large Databases servicing distributed software applications.
• Measure and optimise new implemented systems performance, with an eye toward pushing our capabilities forward.
• Build software and systems to manage platform infrastructure and applications.
• Improve reliability, quality, and time‑to‑market of our suite of software solutions.
• Partner with development teams to improve services through rigorous testing and release procedures.
• Document procedures, best practices, and troubleshooting steps for knowledge sharing and team collaboration.
• Deliver large technical projects.
• Act as an escalation for other support teams within TechOps.
• Plan, prioritise, and estimate tasks using Jira.
• Experience in mentoring junior DBAs and providing technical leadership on database design, optimisation, and migration strategies.

Essential Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• MySQL
• Proficiency in MySQL replication (master‑slave, master‑master) and high availability configurations.
• Experience in query performance optimisation, including slow query analysis, indexing strategies, and troubleshooting.
• Strong understanding of schema optimisation to enhance database performance.
• Experience managing MySQL upgrades and schema migrations in production environments, ensuring minimal downtime and data integrity.
• In‑depth knowledge of replication techniques across various technologies to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.
• Experience setting up and maintaining multi‑master replication, geo‑replication, GTID, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Proficient in resolving replication lag, failover issues, and ensuring data integrity across platforms.
• PostgreSQL / NoSQL databases
• Expertise in PostgreSQL replication (synchronous, asynchronous), logical replication, and managing replication lag.
• Ability to troubleshoot and resolve slow queries.
• Experience in PostgreSQL schema optimisation (indexing, partitioning, query rewrites) for efficient data retrieval.
• Solid understanding of upgrades and migrations, including handling major and minor version upgrades and managing extension compatibility.
• Demonstrated experience in performing database upgrades (both major and minor versions) with minimal downtime, ensuring compatibility across systems and handling post‑upgrade issues.
• Expertise in managing database migrations, including in‑place migrations, cross‑database migrations (e.g., MySQL to PostgreSQL or MongoDB to CouchDB), migrating between cloud providers or on‑prem to cloud, and automating/scripting the migration process where possible.
• Experience in versioning and testing migration scripts to ensure smooth transitions with minimal service interruption.
• Monitoring & Troubleshooting
• Strong experience with database monitoring tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, Percona Monitoring and Management) for tracking performance metrics and ensuring database health.
• Expertise in diagnosing and resolving performance issues related to replication, slow queries, schema design, and database migrations.
• Knowledge of setting up alerting systems and responding proactively to database issues.

Desirable Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• Automation & Scripting
• Proficiency in scripting languages (e.g., Python, Shell, Bash) to automate routine DBA tasks such as backups, monitoring, upgrades, and migrations.
• Experience with automation tools such as Ansible, Chef, or Puppet to manage database configurations across multiple environments.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines for database schema changes and migrations to ensure controlled and tested deployments.
• Apache Druid / Column based databases
• Familiarity with setting up and managing replication across Druid clusters, including data availability and data sharding strategies.
• Experience with query optimisation in Druid, especially for long‑running queries in OLAP workloads.
• Understanding of schema design and optimisation for Druid’s columnar data format.
• Knowledge of managing Druid upgrades and migrations within distributed environments to ensure zero‑downtime or minimal disruption.
• MongoDB
• Expertise in MongoDB replication (ReplicaSets, Sharded Clusters) to ensure data redundancy, fault tolerance and scalability.
• Experience with slow query troubleshooting using tools like the MongoDB Profiler and Aggregation Framework optimisation.
• Proficient in schema design for MongoDB, focusing on denormalisation, indexing strategies, and sharding to improve query performance.
• Hands‑on experience with upgrading MongoDB versions and migrating data between MongoDB clusters or from on‑premises to cloud environments.
• Additional experience
• Experience with monitoring systems (Zabbix, Prometheus).
• Containerisation and Orchestration: familiarity with deploying and managing databases in containerised environments (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with JIRA and Confluence.
• Openness to learn the required technologies.
• An interest in development, new technologies, and innovation.
• Supporting development teams into the refactoring of technical debt.

At Partnerize, we recognise it is unrealistic for a candidate to fulfil 100% of the criteria in this job description. We encourage you to apply if you feel you meet the majority requirements above. We know that skills evolve over time, so if you have a keen appetite to learn and evolve alongside us over time, come join our team!

UK Benefits & Perks

25 days holiday in addition to