Senior Database Administrator

Equals Money; United Kingdom; Hybrid; GBP 50,000 - 70,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial services company in the UK is seeking a Senior Database Administrator responsible for managing the health, performance, and reliability of MySQL clusters. This role involves automating routine checks, optimizing queries, ensuring backups, and collaborating with engineering teams. The ideal candidate will have strong MySQL/Aurora skills and scripting experience. This position offers a competitive salary, with benefits including 25 days of holiday, gym access, and a hybrid working arrangement.

Benefits

Competitive salary

25 days holiday + birthday off

Learning & development budget

Free onsite gym

Health and wellbeing discounts

Interbank currency rates

Private healthcare

Free eye tests

Mental health services

Life assurance

Pension scheme

Cycle to Work scheme

Season ticket loans

Complimentary refreshments

Qualifications

• Strong practical experience with MySQL / Aurora MySQL administration.
• Proven ability to profile and tune queries effectively.
• Solid knowledge of backup strategies and restore experience.
• Experience with database monitoring and alerting tools.
• Comfortable scripting and automation skills.

Responsibilities

• Monitor cluster health and alerts, investigating anomalies.
• Diagnose and optimize slow queries and transactions.
• Ensure backups and recovery procedures are maintained.
• Perform capacity planning and maintenance activities.
• Automate checks and reports, providing recommendations.

Skills

MySQL administration

Query profiling

Backup strategies

Scripting

Monitoring and alerting

Tools

Aurora MySQL

Percona Toolkit

CloudWatch

Job description

About us

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 of 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.

About the role

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.

About you

We believe that certain skills are essential in order to be successful in this role and these are detailed below. You may not have all the other skills we have outlined as desirable, we understand that and will still welcome your application. We will carry out individual interviews for shortlisted candidates and assess who is best suited for the role after we have discussed everything with you.

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.

Essential Skills

• 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.
• A role model for our values:
  • Make it happen
  • Succeed together
  • Be the customer
  • Go beyond

Desirable Skills

• 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).

Our investment in you

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;

Benefits

1. A competitive salary benchmarked against a peer group.
2. 25 days holiday per year + your birthday off.
3. Opportunities for progression, development and learning new skills - £250 towards the cost of learning & development.
4. Free onsite Nuffield Health gym & pool (London) and discounted gym membership elsewhere.
5. GetActive with Aviva – Health and Wellbeing discounts on services and products.
6. Interbank currency rates on travel money and international transfers.
7. Bupa Private Healthcare.
8. Free Eye Test and £50 up to the cost of glasses.
9. EAP Service – Mental Health Services.
10. Life Assurance Policy – x3 annual salary.
11. Contributory pension scheme.
12. Cycle to Work Scheme.
13. Season Ticket Loans.
14. Enhanced Par Policies.
15. Complimentary tea, coffee, soft drinks and fruit.
16. We operate a hybrid working arrangement where possible.

Where possible we offer the opportunity to work flexibly and the opportunity to balance some remote working with time in the office collaborating, taking part in events and developing the social connections that make working with us rewarding.

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.