Database Platform Engineer
Job Description
[Up to c. £175k Comp Package | Hybrid Working]
Role Overview
We’re supporting a world-class quantitative research organisation that operates at the intersection of advanced science, large-scale computing, and data-driven decision making. As part of a broader platform engineering function, the business is looking to strengthen its database capability by hiring a Database Platform Engineer to help design, operate, and evolve the data services that underpin research, analytics, and core business systems. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on reliability, performance, and automation rather than application feature development. You’ll work closely with engineers and researchers to provide robust, scalable database platforms across on-prem and cloud environments, while helping push operational maturity through tooling, standardisation, and smart automation...
Key Responsibilities
- Design, operate, and scale highly available database services supporting research and production workloads
- Own day-to-day reliability, performance, and lifecycle management of relational database platforms across hybrid environments
- Improve automation around provisioning, upgrades, backup, replication, and monitoring using scripting and infrastructure tooling
- Analyse and resolve performance bottlenecks, capacity constraints, and stability issues across live database estates
- Partner with application and research teams to design data solutions aligned with latency, throughput, and resilience requirements
- Contribute to platform-wide standards covering availability, recovery, security, and operational best practice
- Define and improve monitoring, alerting, and service metrics to maintain predictable and observable data services
- Participate in a support rota for critical systems, with a strong focus on prevention through engineering rather than reactive firefighting
What You’ll Bring...
- 4+ years’ experience working with production database platforms or data infrastructure in a technical engineering role
- Strong hands-on experience with at least one major relational database system such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, or comparable technologies
- Experience running databases in cloud or hybrid environments, including AWS-hosted services
- A solid understanding of database behaviour under load, including query planning, indexing, replication, and concurrency
- Confidence operating Linux-based systems, including troubleshooting performance and stability issues at the OS level
- Practical experience automating operational workflows using Python or similar scripting languages
- Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code or configuration management tooling such as Terraform or Ansible
- An engineering mindset that prioritises reliability, repeatability, and clear ownership of systems
- The ability to work collaboratively with engineers and researchers while maintaining accountability for platform health
- Exposure to containerised or Kubernetes-based environments supporting stateful workloads
- (Preferred) Experience with observability stacks used to monitor databases and infrastructure at scale
- (Preferred) Knowledge of distributed or cloud-native database technologies, streaming platforms, or data platform patterns
...
Apply for this role
All fields marked with * are required.