Senior DB Platform Lead – GCP, 24/7 Reliability

Thgingenuity; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

THG Ingenuity in Manchester seeks a Database Platform Manager to lead the group’s database estate. You will own the technical direction, drive consolidation and modernisation, and partner with the Data Reliability Engineering team to deliver reliable, scalable data services.

You will manage a UK and India DBA team, set run books, and partner with senior stakeholders on roadmap trade-offs, cost control, and resiliency, while balancing on-call responsibilities.

Qualifications

• PostgreSQL (core requirement): deep, current, hands‑on expertise covering performance tuning, replication, high availability and failover, upgrades, backup and point‑in‑time recovery
• Microsoft SQL Server: strong administration experience including Always On availability groups, clustering, query tuning and maintenance
• Migration between platforms: practical experience moving production workloads between database engines, including schema and code conversion, data migration and cutover
• SQL: able to write and optimise complex queries and diagnose execution plans first‑hand
• Google Cloud Platform: production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), and a clear view of the trade‑offs between self‑managed and managed services
• On‑premiseinfrastructure: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, and the realities of a hybrid estate
• GitHub, CI/CD and change management: everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, and a disciplined approach to change control in a production environment
• 24/7 service ownership: on‑call, incident and problem management, SLAs, post‑incident review
• Technology evaluation and influence: assessing new database technologies objectively and making a clear, evidence‑based case to technical and non‑technical stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost
• Line management: in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context
• Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership

Responsibilities

• Technical direction: define the estate's roadmap and evaluate emerging database technologies with clear pros/cons
• Own the strategy and delivery of consolidation and modernisation across the estate, including sequencing and risk
• Shape platform direction around high resiliency and cost effectiveness and gain stakeholder consensus
• Target architecture on GCP: identify where self‑managed remains and where managed services fit
• Standards for database design, HA, DR, patching and backup/recovery
• Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance tuning, replication, failover, incident reviews
• Automation, IaC and database CI/CD, with GitHub change control
• Line management of the UK and India DBA teams and development of talent
• L1/L2/L3 operating model and on‑call readiness
• Capacity planning, weekly status/RAG reporting, cross‑functional governance
• Vendor and cloud partner relationship management
• Input into cost forecasting and run‑rate for GCP

Skills

PostgreSQL

Microsoft SQL Server

Migration between platforms

SQL

Google Cloud Platform

On-premises infrastructure

GitHub CI/CD

24/7 service ownership

Capacity planning

Line management

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

Flyway

Prometheus

Grafana

Kafka

Job description

THG Ingenuity in Manchester seeks a Database Platform Manager to lead the group’s database estate. You will own the technical direction, drive consolidation and modernisation, and partner with the Data Reliability Engineering team to deliver reliable, scalable data services.

You will manage a UK and India DBA team, set run books, and partner with senior stakeholders on roadmap trade-offs, cost control, and resiliency, while balancing on-call responsibilities.