Database Platform Lead - GCP Modernisation & Resilience

THG Ingenuity Ltd.; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

THG Ingenuity is seeking a strong technical leader to run our database platform on Google Cloud Platform with self-managed services. You will shape modernization, decide where to use managed vs self-managed services, and lead the DBA team across the UK and India as a 24/7 service owner.

You will partner with the Data Reliability Engineering team, drive automation, IaC, and CI/CD, and balance resilience with cost while delivering a clear roadmap and stakeholder alignment.

Qualifications

• PostgreSQL (core requirement): deep, current, hands-on expertise covering performance tuning, replication, high availability and failover, upgrades, backup and point-in-time recovery
• Microsoft SQL Server: strong administration experience including Always On availability groups, clustering, query tuning and maintenance
• Migration between platforms: practical experience moving production workloads between database engines, including schema and code conversion, data migration and cutover
• SQL: able to write and optimise complex queries and diagnose execution plans first-hand
• Google Cloud Platform: production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), and a clear view of the trade-offs between self-managed and managed services
• On-premise infrastructure: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, and the realities of a hybrid estate
• GitHub, CI/CD and change management: everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, and a disciplined approach to change control in a production environment
• 24/7 service ownership: on-call, incident and problem management, SLAs, post-incident review
• Technology evaluation and influence: assessing new database technologies objectively and making a clear, evidence-based case to technical and non-technical stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost
• Line management in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context
• Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership

Responsibilities

• Technical direction: set the technical roadmap and evaluate emerging database technologies for merit and clear rationale
• Team leadership: line manage the DBA team across UK & India, 1:1s, performance and hiring
• Planning and stakeholders: capacity planning, weekly status to senior leadership, cross-functional forums
• Essential and Desirable: lead modernization priorities, cost forecasting, vendor relationships, and design reviews

Skills

PostgreSQL

Microsoft SQL Server

Migration experience

SQL

Google Cloud Platform

On-premise infrastructure

GitHub CI/CD

24/7 service ownership

Performance tuning

Line management

Capacity planning

Tools

GitHub

Terraform

Ansible

Python

PowerShell

Bash

Flyway

Liquibase

Redgate

Prometheus

Job description

THG Ingenuity is seeking a strong technical leader to run our database platform on Google Cloud Platform with self-managed services. You will shape modernization, decide where to use managed vs self-managed services, and lead the DBA team across the UK and India as a 24/7 service owner.

You will partner with the Data Reliability Engineering team, drive automation, IaC, and CI/CD, and balance resilience with cost while delivering a clear roadmap and stakeholder alignment.