Lead Database Administrator

Sharp Gaming; Manchester; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 95,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading gaming company in Manchester is seeking a Lead DBA to oversee the architecture and operations of database platforms. This strategic role involves designing highly available systems and ensuring security and performance. Candidates should have strong experience with relational and non-relational databases, Linux administration, and CI/CD practices. A competitive salary ranging from £80,000 to £95,000 is offered, along with various benefits including bonuses and well-being support.

Benefits

Competitive salary

Discretionary bonus schemes

Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay

Employee well-being support

Qualifications

• Strong experience across relational and non-relational platforms like MariaDB and MySQL.
• Deep expertise in high availability, replication, clustering, and disaster recovery.
• Strong Linux administration and advanced scripting skills.
• Proven ability to solve complex performance issues.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and maintenance of highly available, fault-tolerant database infrastructure.
• Plan for growth and scalability aligned with business and platform needs.
• Ensure compliance with security, governance, and regulatory requirements.
• Mentor Senior and Junior DBAs.

Skills

Relational and non-relational platforms (MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB)

High availability, replication, clustering, and disaster recovery

Linux administration

Scripting skills

CI/CD and automation

Tools

Ansible

Terraform

Job description

About Us

Our mission is to dominate the betting and gaming industry on a global scale and we need the very best Tech talent to help us achieve this.

We recently migrated all of our customers onto our very own proprietary platform - so it's an exciting time to join us. With the help of our new platform, we're able to pioneer new products and drive more advanced, creative technologies. The result? Unrivalled experiences for millions of customers worldwide.

Betfred's Technology department is driven by innovation, and you'll be at the heart of unlocking our new platform's potential. So, if you want to help shape the future of betting and gaming, then it's time to join us.

Job Purpose

The Lead DBA owns the architecture, operations and strategic direction of the database platforms. The role spans infrastructure, application and reliability engineering disciplines ensuring environments are secure, scalable and performant. The Lead DBA works closely with the Engineering Manager, architects and engineering teams to define standards, guide technical decisions and mentor the DBA team. This role is both strategic and hands‑on delivering business‑critical database services.

Job Duties

• Lead the design and maintenance of highly available, fault‑tolerant database infrastructure.
• Plan for growth and scalability aligned with business and platform needs.
• Evaluate and integrate emerging database technologies to improve performance and efficiency.
• Ensure compliance with security, governance and regulatory requirements.
• Manage resource utilisation across storage, compute, memory and networking.
• Implement and validate replication, clustering and disaster recovery strategies.
• Apply patches, upgrades and security hardening.
• Monitor database health, capacity and performance proactively.
• Collaborate with developers to optimise schema design, indexing and queries.
• Support deployments, migrations and application‑aligned changes.
• Maintain data integrity and resilience across all workloads.
• Troubleshoot complex database and application‑facing issues.
• Build and maintain CI/CD and automation pipelines.
• Automate routine operations including backups, restores and patching.
• Identify and remediate platform risks and points of failure.
• Partner with DevOps, SRE and platform teams on operational maturity.
• Define and enforce operational standards and best practices.
• Mentor Senior and Junior DBAs.
• Drive continuous improvement across database operations and tooling

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Essential

• Strong experience across relational and non‑relational platforms (MariaDB, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.).
• Deep expertise in HA, replication, clustering and DR.
• Strong Linux administration and advanced scripting skills.
• Proven ability to solve complex performance issues.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance and governance.
• Experience leading teams and defining standards.
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD, automation and IaC (Ansible, Terraform).

Desirables

• Experience with cloud or hybrid database platforms.
• Familiarity with modern observability tooling.
• Knowledge of sharding, partitioning and scale‑out strategies.
• Experience supporting application performance and database integration.

What’s in it for you?

We offer a variety of competitive benefits, some of which vary depending on the role you’re recruited to. Some of what you can expect in this role includes:

• A competitive rate of pay and pension contribution (£80,000 - £95,000)
• Generous discretionary bonus schemes, incentives and competitions
• An annual leave entitlement that increases with length of service
• Access to an online GP 24/7, 365 days a year for you and your immediate family.
• Employee wellbeing support through our Employee Assistance Programme
• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay
• Long Service Recognition
• Access to a pay day savings scheme, financial coach and up to 40% of your earned wage ahead of payday, through Wagestream.

For More information, visit https://betfredcareers.com/why-join/