Lead Database Administrator in Manchester

MRJ are partnered with one of the UK's most recognisable technology businesses as they continue to invest in the platform powering millions of customers worldwide.

Following the successful migration to their own proprietary platform, they're entering the next phase of growth and are looking for a Lead Database Administrator to own the strategy, reliability and evolution of their database estate.

This is a leadership role with plenty of technical depth.

You'll shape the future of the database platform while remaining hands-on with architecture, performance, automation and operational excellence.

The Role

You'll lead the database function, taking ownership of highly available, secure and scalable database platforms that support critical customer-facing systems.

Working closely with Engineering, Architecture, Dev Ops and Platform teams, you'll define database standards, mentor the DBA team and drive continuous improvements across performance, automation and resilience.

If you enjoy solving complex technical challenges while influencing engineering strategy, this is an opportunity to make a significant impact within a modern technology environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design, architecture and maintenance of highly available database platforms.
• Define the long-term database strategy, ensuring scalability, resilience and security.
• Design and maintain replication, clustering and disaster recovery solutions.
• Monitor database performance, capacity and health across multiple environments.
• Optimise schemas, indexing and query performance alongside engineering teams.
• Lead database upgrades, patching, security hardening and governance.
• Build and improve automation through CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code.
• Drive operational excellence across backups, restores, monitoring and platform reliability.
• Partner with Dev Ops, SRE and Platform Engineering teams to improve operational maturity.
• Mentor and develop Senior and Junior Database Administrators while establishing engineering standards and best practices.
• What They're Looking For
• Strong commercial experience across relational and No SQL databases including Maria DB, My SQL and Mongo DB.
• Deep understanding of high availability, replication, clustering and disaster recovery.
• Strong Linux administration and advanced scripting experience.
• Proven experience troubleshooting complex database performance issues.
• Experience implementing database security, governance and compliance best practices.
• Previous experience leading database teams or providing technical leadership.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, automation and Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
• Excellent stakeholder management and the ability to work closely with Engineering, Architecture and Platform teams.

Desirable Experience

• Cloud or hybrid database platforms.
• Modern observability and monitoring tooling.
• Sharding, partitioning and large-scale database architectures.
• Supporting application performance through database optimisation.
• Next Steps

If you're an experienced Database Administrator ready to step into a technical leadership role—or an established Lead DBA looking for your next challenge—we'd love to hear from you.

Apply today or get in touch with the MRJ team for a confidential conversation.

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