Senior DBA – Scale, Automation & Reliability

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

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.