Senior Database Administrator

Equals Money; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services firm in the UK is seeking a Senior Database Administrator to manage the health and performance of its Aurora MySQL clusters. You will work closely with engineering teams to ensure efficient performance and reliability, automate routine checks, and handle backup and recovery strategies. The ideal candidate will have strong MySQL administration skills, experience with performance tuning, and familiarity with AWS services. Join our diverse team committed to delivering exceptional services to customers and enjoy competitive benefits including a hybrid working model.

Benefits

Competitive salary

25 days holiday + birthday off

Free onsite gym

Bupa Private Healthcare

Training budget of £250

Hybrid working arrangement

Mental Health Services

Qualifications

• Strong practical experience with MySQL/Aurora MySQL administration at production scale.
• Proven ability to profile and tune queries and indexes.
• Experience with AWS Aurora and RDS internals.

Responsibilities

• Monitor cluster health and alerts, act on incidents.
• Diagnose and optimise slow queries.
• Ensure backups and snapshots are configured and tested.
• Perform capacity planning and maintenance.
• Automate routine checks and reports.

Skills

MySQL administration

Performance tuning

Scripting (Bash, Python)

Monitoring and alerting

Tools

CloudWatch

Percona Toolkit

ProxySQL

Job description

Overview

We're hiring a pragmatic Senior Database Administrator to own the health, performance and reliability of our fleet of ~50 Aurora MySQL clusters. You'll work closely with engineering to keep systems running smoothly – ensuring backups and alarms are configured, capacity is right-sized, and maintenance windows and failover procedures are tested. Day-to-day you'll profile and optimise slow queries, review and add indexes, rewrite problematic SQL, and drive performance tuning and schema-change best practices. You'll also automate routine checks, maintain runbooks for incidents and recovery, and partner with teams to plan migrations, capacity growth and long-term improvements.

Responsibilities

• Monitor cluster health and alerts (CloudWatch / Performance Insights / slow-query), investigate anomalies and act on incidents.
• Diagnose and optimise slow queries and problematic transactions: use EXPLAIN, rewrite queries, and add/remove indexes as needed.
• Ensure backups, snapshots and PITR are configured and tested; maintain and exercise recovery/runbook procedures.
• Perform capacity planning, sizing and maintenance (patches, minor version upgrades, failover drills) to keep performance and availability targets.
• Automate routine checks and reports (index coverage, long-running queries, replica lag, space usage) and produce actionable recommendations for engineering teams.
• Strong practical experience with MySQL / Aurora MySQL administration at production scale (schema design, replication, failover).
• Proven ability to profile and tune queries and indexes (EXPLAIN, slow-query analysis, query rewriting).
• Solid knowledge of backup & recovery strategies for Aurora (snapshots, continuous backups/PITR) and tested restore experience.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting for databases (CloudWatch, Performance Insights, slow-query logs) and acting on alarms.
• Comfortable scripting/automation (Bash, Python, or similar) to build health checks, runbooks and operational tooling; good Linux fundamentals.

Qualifications

• Familiarity with MySQL tooling such as pt-query-digest / Percona Toolkit, ProxySQL, or similar performance/management tools.
• AWS experience or certification (Aurora/RDS internals, KMS for encryption, IAM, multi-AZ/Global DB setups).

About the Company & Benefits

Over the last 18 years, we have helped over a million satisfied customers move and manage their money. Our award-winning product portfolio allows our customers to make low-cost multi-currency payments across various payment products. From travel money to transfers, currency hedging, to expense management, we are focused on a single goal of making it easy for our customers to manage and move their money.

As a business, we are committed to delivering value to our customers through the combination of advanced payments technology and personal expert service. We're doing this by hiring exceptional people and are now looking for a Senior Database Administrator to join our team. Within our offices in London, Chester and Los Angeles and Europe, Equals comprises three business lines and brands - Equals Money, FairFX and CardOneMoney. You will join a very close-knit, talented and supportive team from various backgrounds who believe that bringing different perspectives together helps us understand our customers\' needs. United, by one thing, making money management straightforward and cost-effective for our customers.

We welcome people into Equals and desire to grow and develop our talented teams. We believe in teamwork and celebrating our successes. We strive to embrace our values. We want to put you in the driving seat of your career and achieve your full potential through growth opportunities and developmental support. When you join Equals, we aim to help you to get more out of your career. We will also offer you the following benefits, Equals strives to create a workplace where we can all be ourselves. We believe in inclusion, equality and the power of diversity, so you\'ll be encouraged to bring your unique perspectives and experiences, and help us understand what you need to do your best work.

• A competitive salary benchmarked against a peer group.
• 25 days holiday per year + your birthday off
• Opportunities for progression, development and learning new skills - £250 towards the cost of learning & development.
• Free onsite Nuffield Health gym & pool (London) and discounted gym membership elsewhere
• GetActive with Aviva - Health and Wellbeing discounts on services and products
• Interbank currency rates on travel money and international transfers.
• Bupa Private Healthcare
• Free Eye Test and £50 up to the cost of glasses
• EAP Service - Mental Health Services
• Life Assurance Policy - x3 annual salary
• Contributory pension scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Season Ticket Loans
• Enhanced Parental Policies
• Complimentary tea, coffee, soft drinks and fruit
• Hybrid working arrangement where possible