Senior MySQL Database Administrator (DBA)

Aristocrat Gaming; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Aristocrat is seeking a Senior Database Administrator to own the end-to-end lifecycle of MySQL platforms, ensuring security, scalability and reliability for high-traffic game workloads.

You will partner with Architecture, Engineering and SRE to optimize performance, automate provisioning, backups, replication, DR, and to define SLOs.

Deep MySQL internals knowledge, strong Linux administration, and excellent English communication are essential to guide engineers and drive operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Extensive production MySQL experience in high-traffic environments.
• Strong Linux system administration skills.
• Experience with replication, backup/recovery, and high-availability patterns.
• Ability to collaborate in a fast-paced distributed environment.
• Excellent English communication—written and spoken.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end lifecycle of database platforms from architecture to scalability planning.
• Optimize performance and manage incident response.
• Define and meet SLOs with Platform Reliability Team.
• Improve automation for provisioning, backups, replication, and deployments.
• Ensure security governance and regulatory compliance.

Skills

MySQL internals

Replication & backup strategies

Query optimization

Linux administration

High availability patterns

English communication

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

Percona PMM

Terraform

Ansible

Helm

Job description

At Aristocrat, we’re passionate about bringing happiness to life through the power of play! As a Senior Database Administrator, you will have a meaningful role in ensuring our critically important database systems are secure, scalable, and reliable. You’ll join a world-class team, applying your expertise to support the high-traffic, data-intensive workloads that power our popular gaming platforms. This is an outstanding chance to create a significant impact within an ambitious and innovative organization.

This role owns the end-to-end lifecycle of database platforms - from architecture and design, through performance optimization and automation, to incident response and long-term scalability planning. The successful candidate will act as a technical authority for MySQL, partnering closely with Architecture, Engineering, Data Science, and SRE teams to ensure our databases can safely scale to meet high-traffic, data-intensive workloads.

Key Responsibilities

Database Architecture & Scalability

• Own and evolve the architecture of high-performance, highly available MySQL platforms supporting production game workloads (>50k QPS).
• Design database solutions that support long-term data growth, fault tolerance, and operational simplicity.
• Participate in technology roadmap planning, capacity forecasting, and architectural decision-making.

Performance & Reliability Engineering

• Proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve database performance bottlenecks across schema design, queries, indexing, and configuration.
• Own performance issues end-to-end: triage, root cause analysis, solution design, implementation, and production verification.
• Define and help meet database reliability targets (SLOs) in collaboration with the Platform Reliability Team.

Automation, Tooling & Operations

• Improve and maintain automation for: Database provisioning
• Backup and recovery
• Replication, failover, and disaster recovery
• Schema migrations and deployments
• Enhance observability through monitoring, alerting, and tooling (e.g. PMM, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Shift performance and security detection earlier in the development lifecycle via tooling and guidelines.

Database Governance & Security

• Define and enforce database security standards, access controls, and auditing.
• Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements (e.g. gaming, PCI-DSS).
• Act as a gatekeeper for database-related application changes via reviews and guidance.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Partner closely with Architecture, Engineering, and Data Science teams to deliver secure, scalable, and performant database designs.
• Act as a database maintainer for the Product Madness codebase, reviewing schema and query changes prior to release.
• Provide hands-on support through pairing, design reviews, and technical consultation.

Documentation & Best Practices

• Build and maintain high-quality, HLD and LLD documentation covering architecture, operations, and standard methodologies.
• delivering database services and guidelines to our internal customers
• Continuously improve team workflows, operational processes, and standards.

Leadership & Collaboration

• Guide engineers and DBAs, improving the overall database maturity of the organization.
• Lead by example in operational excellence, ownership, and technical rigor.

Required Experience & Skills

• Significant production experience with MySQL in critical environments (Percona MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB)
• MySQL internals
• MongoDB internals
• Replication and backup/recovery strategies
• Query optimization and performance tuning High-availability and scaling patterns
• Strong Linux administration skills.
• Demonstrable experience operating databases at high efficiency and low latency.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a fast-paced, distributed environment.
• Strong proficiency in both written and spoken English communication.

Desirable / Bonus Experience

• MySQL clustering technologies (e.g. Galera Cluster).
• Monitoring tools such as Percona PMM.
• Practical experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and MongoDB.
• Cloud platforms, especially GCP (Cloud SQL), with AWS as a plus.
• Infrastructure-as-Code and automation tools:
• Terraform
• Ansible
• Helm
• Cloud SQL
• Postgress

Join us at Aristocrat and be part of a team dedicated to delivering happiness to millions of players worldwide. Together, we can build outstanding gaming experiences!

This job description may have been reviewed and enhanced usingAI-assisted tools to improve clarity, consistency, and inclusivity. All final content, role requirements and hiring decisions remain subject to human review and approval by Aristocrat.

Compensation Philosophy

We offer a comprehensive pay and benefits package designed to stay competitive in the market, support your wellbeing, and recognise your contribution to our success. Our approach is underpinned by a pay-for-performance belief in rewarding individual impact. Your specific compensation package will be determined by factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location.

Depending on your role and location, you may be eligible for annual bonuses and incentives, health and wellbeing benefits, paid time off, retirement plans, insurance coverage, and other local or statutory benefits.

Specific details about compensation and benefits for this position will be discussed during the recruitment process.