Database Platform Manager

THG Ingenuity; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

THG Ingenuity, headquartered in Manchester, seeks a Database Platform Manager to lead a 24/7 DBA team. You will drive the strategy for PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and cross‑platform migrations on Google Cloud, balancing on‑prem and cloud‑native services.

The role requires close collaboration with the Data Reliability Engineering team and senior stakeholders to deliver a scalable, resilient platform. You will own the technical roadmap, oversee runbooks and change management in GitHub, and mentor a

Qualifications

• Hands-on PostgreSQL with performance tuning, replication, HA, and recovery.
• Strong SQL Server administration including Always On and clustering.
• Experience migrating workloads between database engines.
• Ability to write and optimise complex SQL queries.
• Experience with GCP products and hybrid/in-house infrastructure.
• Knowledge of CI/CD and IaC practices for DB changes.
• Experience leading a DBA team in multiple locations.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical roadmap for the database estate and evaluate new technologies.
• Own consolidation and modernisation across the estate with risk assessment.
• Shape architecture for GCP, self-managed vs managed services decisions.
• Set standards for design, HA, DR, patching and backup.
• Lead 24/7 DBA operations and incident response.
• Line manage the UK and India DBA team and drive development.
• Coordinate with Data Reliability Engineering on automation and SLOs.
• Plan capacity, run weekly status reports, and manage vendor relations.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Microsoft SQL Server

Migration between platforms

SQL

Google Cloud Platform

On-premise infrastructure

GitHub CI/CD

24/7 service ownership

Technology evaluation

Line management

Capacity planning

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Python/PowerShell

Job description

About THG Ingenuity

THG Ingenuity is a fully integrated digital commerce ecosystem, designed to power brands without limits. Our global end-to-end tech platform is comprised of three products: THG Commerce, THG Studios, THG Fulfilment.

Each represents a single, unified solution, overcoming challenges and taking brands direct-to-consumer. Our client portfolio includes globally recognised brands such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Elemis, Homebase, and Proctor & Gamble.

Database Platform Manager

Company: THG Ingenuity Location: Manchester (Head Office)

Reports to: Director of Data

Role Overview

We are looking for a strong technical leader to run our database platform.

Our estate runs on Google Cloud Platform following a recent migration to self‑managed services, and there is a real opportunity here to shape the next phase. How we consolidate and modernise the estate, where managed and cloud‑native services earn their place, which new technologies are worth adopting, and how the platform scales with the business are all live questions. You will lead the thinking on them and work with stakeholders across the business to agree and deliver the roadmap.

You will lead our DBA team, who own every database across the group regardless of the application running on it and who run the platform as a 24/7 service. You will work hand in hand with our Data Reliability Engineering team, whose Principal Engineer is your peer and whose focus is automation, fleet reliability and SLOs.

This role is weighted toward hands‑on technical depth. You should be as credible in a design review or an incident bridge as you are in a planning session with senior stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Technical direction

• The technical roadmap for the estate. We want someone genuinely interested in emerging database technologies who evaluates them on merit and can articulate the pros and cons clearly to a technical or non‑technical audience

• Own the strategy and delivery of the consolidation and modernisation programme across the estate, including sequencing, risk and making the case to the business

• Shape the direction of the platform and the team around two priorities, high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making the trade‑offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus behind them

• Target architecture on GCP: where self‑managed instances remain right and where managed and cloud‑native services earn their place

• Standards for database design, performance, high availability and disaster recovery, patching, and backup and recovery

• Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance and query tuning, replication and failover, major incident response and post‑incident review

• Automation, infrastructure as code and database CI/CD, with everything in GitHub under proper change management, so routine change scales without scaling headcount

Team leadership

• Line management of the DBA team across the UK and India: 1:1s, development, performance, hiring and onboarding

• The L1/L2/L3 operating model and the rotas that support it, including on‑call, run sustainably and held as data rather than tribal knowledge

• Growing technical depth across the team through design review, pairing and deliberate development

• Working as a close peer to the Principal Data Reliability Engineer, with both teams operating together on automation, reliability and incident response

Planning and stakeholders

• Capacity and allocation planning for the team, and the trade‑offs when demand exceeds supply

• Weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership, and representing the platform in cross‑functional forums

• Agreeing modernisation priorities with stakeholders and sequencing them realistically alongside run commitments

• Input into GCP cost forecasting and run‑rate, and day‑to‑day management of vendor and cloud partner relationships

Skills and Experience

Essential

• 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

Desirable

• Couchbase or comparable NoSQL / document‑store experience

• CockroachDB or other distributed SQL platforms

• Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash

• Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate

• Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent

• Kafka or streaming platforms

• Managing distributed or offshore teams

• Regulated or high‑availability environments [sector, if relevant]

You as a Person

• You are curious about technology and restless with the status quo. You keep an eye on where the database world is going, form a view, and are willing to argue for change when the current approach has stopped being the right one

• You challenge constructively. You are comfortable disagreeing with a decision, including one of your own, and you do it with evidence and without making it personal

• You give people room to grow. We have a culture that supports people stretching beyond their job description, and you create that space for your team rather than defending boundaries

• You are pragmatic about trade‑offs. You can hold resilience, cost and delivery pressure in the same conversation and make a defensible call rather than an idealistic one

• You communicate well with people who are not database engineers. You can take a complex technical trade‑off and make it land with a stakeholder who needs to make a decision, not a lecture

• You lead from the front. You are hands‑on by instinct, and your team see you in the detail with them, particularly when things are going wrong

• You take on‑call seriously as a human problem, not just a rota. Sustainable, fairly shared, and something people are supported through

THG Ingenuity is proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you are invited to interview, please let us know if there are any reasonable adjustments we can make to the recruitment process that will enable you to perform to the best of your ability.

THG Ingenuity is committed to creating a diverse & inclusive environment and hence welcomes applications from all sections of the community.