Senior Database Administrator in Edinburgh

As a Senior Database Administrator, you’ll be the steward of the data layer that powers Podfather. Working closely with our Software Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and CTO, you will keep our databases reliable, performant, and well-designed as the business grows. If you love solving real-world problems, collaborating with a passionate team, and making a tangible impact every day, we want to hear from you.

Who is Podfather? With our team of around 60 people working remotely or at our Edinburgh head office, we believe that we can offer you something special here at Podfather. Our whole ethos is about creating a unique and rewarding experience for both our customers and our employees. When you work here, you will get involved with challenging projects within a fun and friendly environment. We are a medium-sized company, which means you get to be part of multiple projects, wear different hats, and truly see the difference your work makes.

We develop and deliver industry-leading route optimisation and electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) technology to the logistics, construction, and field service sectors. We have some huge clients, and some tiny ones, and because we are growing fast, now is a great time to join our team.

At Podfather, we're guided by our core values: reliable, innovative, determined, collaborative, candid, and caring. You'll see these in action every day in how we work together, solve problems, and support our customers.

Where do you fit in? We recognise that impact in this role can be made in different ways, and that there are different ‘shapes’ of DBA. Depending on your background and interests, this role may lean more towards day-to-day operations and tuning, or more towards schema design and working alongside application developers.

In this role, you will be joining our Engineering & Infrastructure team. You will focus on:

• Database Operations: Take ownership of the day-to-day health of our MariaDB/MySQL estate, monitoring, backups, replication, capacity, upgrades, and patching, ensuring the platform stays reliable and recoverable.
• Schema Design & Evolution: Design new schemas and evolve existing ones to support new product features, working with engineers to ensure changes are safe to deploy, performant at scale, and easy to maintain over time.
• Performance & Scaling: Identify performance hotspots, tune queries/indexes, and help the team plan for growth as we scale to hundreds of thousands of users.
• Driving Change & Problem Solving: Identify, understand, and resolve critical database and data-integrity issues. You'll articulate database trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike to drive high-leverage improvements.
• Information Security: Handle data securely throughout its lifecycle (encryption at rest/in transit), enforce the principle of least privilege, manage secure authentication, and handle patches/updates to protect the database estate.
• Technical Expertise: We are looking for a skilled practitioner who can lead database work to successful technical outcomes by factoring in technical debt, data modelling, stability, security, and business needs.
• Query Optimisation: Comfortable reading and optimising SQL using execution plans, indexes, and configuration tuning.
• Resilience & Observability: Responsible for backup strategies, replication, and disaster recovery procedures (including regular verification). You will fill database monitoring and alerting gaps to stop issues before they become incidents.
• Application Layer Collaboration: Work closely with engineers writing application code (primarily PHP at Podfather) to review how the application talks to the database, ensuring migrations are a routine process rather than a risky event.
• Incident Management: Take a leading role in debugging complex database issues, managing incidents, and collaborating with support teams to share known workarounds.

Required Skills:

• MariaDB/MySQL experience.
• Some experience of growing databases to scale, to hundreds of thousands of users and beyond.
• Some application development experience; PHP would be preferred, but any experience working with a mature codebase would be fine.

Preferred Skills:

• AWS experience preferred, but other cloud experience would also be helpful.
• Data warehousing experience.
• Experience of database scaling technologies such as sharding, pagination, replicas, caching, proxying.
• Experience of wider database technologies such as NoSQL, Graph, time-series DBs.

Ready to help us scale the data layer behind our expanding platform? If you are interested in joining the Podfather team, please email your CV and a cover letter explaining why you're a great fit for the role.