Senior Database Administrator

Sharp Gaming; Manchester; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading gaming company in Manchester is seeking an experienced Senior Database Administrator to oversee the delivery and optimisation of secure, high-performance database services. You will collaborate with various teams to design resilient database solutions and ensure their efficiency. The ideal candidate will have substantial experience in MariaDB/MySQL, automation tools like Ansible, and proficiency in scripting. This role offers a competitive salary range of £65,000 to £85,000 with excellent benefits including bonuses and wellness support.

Benefits

Competitive salary and pension contribution

Generous discretionary bonus schemes

Annual leave entitlement increases with service

Access to online GP 24/7

Employee wellbeing support

Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay

Long Service Recognition

Pay day savings scheme through Wagestream

Qualifications

• Experience in MariaDB/MySQL or equivalent RDBMS environments.
• Strong knowledge of database architecture, replication, partitioning and performance optimisation.
• Proficiency in Linux administration and scripting (Bash, Shell or Python).
• Experience with automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible or Terraform.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across database and system layers.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and observability tooling.

Responsibilities

• Administer and maintain production and non-production database environments.
• Monitor and optimise database performance, replication, backups and high availability configurations.
• Diagnose and resolve complex performance, reliability and capacity issues across database and infrastructure layers.
• Apply patches, upgrades and security hardening to ensure compliance and stability.
• Design and maintain automation for database provisioning, maintenance, monitoring and deployment.
• Implement configuration management and infrastructure-as-code using tools such as Ansible and Terraform.
• Collaborate with SRE and platform engineering teams to embed observability, alerting and resilience best practices.
• Work closely with the Lead DBA and development teams to implement database design standards and performance tuning best practices.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior DBAs and engineers.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis activities ensuring that preventative measures are implemented.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and scalability challenges.
• Evaluate emerging database technologies and contribute to their adoption where appropriate.
• Maintain technical documentation, operational playbooks and automation scripts to support consistency and knowledge sharing.

Skills

Database architecture

Replication

Performance optimisation

Linux administration

Scripting (Bash, Shell, Python)

Automation tools (Ansible, Terraform)

Troubleshooting

CI/CD familiarity

Observability tooling

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 to time to join us.

Job Purpose

The Senior Database Administrator (DBA) is responsible for the delivery, maintenance and optimisation of secure, scalable and high-performance database services. The role requires deep technical expertise across infrastructure, application and reliability engineering disciplines with a focus on ensuring database environments remain stable, efficient and well-automated.

The Senior DBA will work closely with the Lead DBA, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Development teams to design, implement and support resilient database solutions. The role is highly hands-on and suited to a technically driven individual with a passion for continual improvement and operational excellence.

Job Duties

• Administer and maintain production and non-production database environments.
• Monitor and optimise database performance, replication, backups and high availability configurations.
• Diagnose and resolve complex performance, reliability and capacity issues across database and infrastructure layers.
• Apply patches, upgrades and security hardening to ensure compliance and stability.
• Design and maintain automation for database provisioning, maintenance, monitoring and deployment.
• Implement configuration management and infrastructure-as-code using tools such as Ansible and Terraform.
• Collaborate with SRE and platform engineering teams to embed observability, alerting and resilience best practices.
• Work closely with the Lead DBA and development teams to implement database design standards and performance tuning best practices.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior DBAs and engineers.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis activities ensuring that preventative measures are implemented.
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks and scalability challenges.
• Evaluate emerging database technologies and contribute to their adoption where appropriate.
• Maintain technical documentation, operational playbooks and automation scripts to support consistency and knowledge sharing.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience

Essential

• Experience in MariaDB/MySQL or equivalent RDBMS environments.
• Strong knowledge of database architecture, replication, partitioning and performance optimisation.
• Proficiency in Linux administration and scripting (Bash, Shell or Python).
• Experience with automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible or Terraform.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across database and system layers.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and observability tooling.

Desirable

• Experience with AWS RDS or other cloud-managed database platforms.
• Knowledge of Liquibase or similar schema migration tools.
• Understanding of data protection, disaster recovery and retention strategies.
• Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus or Grafana.

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 (£65,000-£85,000)
• 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 our https://betfredcareers.com/why-join/