Database Platform Manager

Jackalope Digital LLC; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

THG Ingenuity seeks a Database Platform Manager to lead a hands-on, high-visibility DBA team across the UK and India. You will drive the consolidation and modernisation of a Google Cloud-based estate, balancing self-managed and cloud-native services while maintaining 24/7 service reliability.

You will work with senior stakeholders to shape the roadmap, manage cost and resiliency, and deliver robust database platforms in a complex, hybrid environment.

Qualifications

• Deep, current PostgreSQL expertise including replication, high availability and PITR.
• Strong MS SQL Server administration with Always On, clustering and tuning.
• Experience migrating workloads between database engines.
• SQL proficiency with complex queries and execution plans.
• GCP production DB workloads and hybrid estates experience.
• Hybrid on-premise infrastructure understanding in a production setting.
• GitHub CI/CD and disciplined change control in production.
• 24/7 service ownership, incident and problem management.
• Capacity planning and reporting to senior leadership.
• Line management experience in infra, DBA or SRE contexts.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical roadmap and evaluate emerging database technologies.
• Own consolidation and modernisation across the estate with risk trade-offs.
• Shape platform direction around resilience and cost effectiveness.
• Set standards for design, HA, DR, patching and backup strategies.
• Lead DBA team across UK and India; manage on-call and rosters.
• Collaborate with Data Reliability Engineering on automation and incident response.

Skills

PostgreSQL

Microsoft SQL Server

Migration between platforms

SQL

Google Cloud Platform

On-premise infrastructure

GitHub, CI/CD and change management

24/7 service ownership

Capacity planning & reporting

Line management (DBA/SRE context)

Tools

Compute Engine

Cloud SQL

CI/CD tooling

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 escalationpointfor 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 andrun-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-premiseinfrastructure: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 managementin an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context
• Capacity planning and reportinginto senior leadership

Desirable

• Couchbaseor comparable NoSQL / document-store experience
• CockroachDBor other distributed SQL platforms