Lead Database Administrator

Morson Edge (Technology); Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Morson Edge (Technology) is seeking an experienced Lead DBA in Manchester to own database architecture, operations, and strategic direction. The role is hands-on with leadership responsibility for secure, scalable, highly available databases across critical systems.

Key focus areas include replication, clustering, disaster recovery, automation with CI/CD, and mentoring a team of DBAs while partnering with engineering, DevOps, and SRE teams to drive standards and platform growth.

Qualifications

• Experience leading a DBA team and setting strategic direction.
• Strong security, governance and compliance practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain resilient database infrastructure, ensuring high availability and performance.
• Implement replication, clustering and disaster recovery solutions.
• Drive automation with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines.
• Mentor and lead a DBA team across production environments.
• Collaborate with engineering, DevOps, SRE and architecture teams to set standards.

Tools

MySQL

MariaDB

MongoDB

Linux administration

CI/CD tools

Job description

Hybrid working in Manchester city centre (2 days per week)

We're recruiting on behalf of a leading Tech business to find an experienced Lead DBA to take ownership of database architecture, operations, and strategic direction. This is a hands-on leadership role responsible for ensuring database platforms remain secure, scalable, highly available, and performant across business-critical systems.

Key responsibilities include designing and maintaining resilient database infrastructure, implementing replication, clustering and disaster recovery solutions, driving automation and CI/CD adoption, optimising performance, ensuring security and compliance, and mentoring a team of DBAs. The role also involves close collaboration with engineering, DevOps, SRE and architecture teams to define standards and support platform growth.

• Strong experience with relational and non-relational databases (e.g. MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB)
• Expertise in high availability, replication, clustering and disaster recovery
• Strong Unix / Linux administration and scripting skills
• Proven database performance tuning and troubleshooting experience
• Knowledge of security, governance and compliance requirements
• Team leadership and mentoring experience
• Experience with automation, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD tools (e.g. Ansible, Terraform)
• Cloud or hybrid database platform experience
• Observability and monitoring tools
• Sharding, partitioning and large-scale database environments
• Application performance and database integration expertise

This is a great opportunity for a DBA leader to put their own stamp on a maturing Production environment and bring other operational teams together.