Database Specialist

Location: Burgess Hill, UK or London, UK

Onsite Requirement: Hybrid (3 days onsite a week)

Employment Type: Contract (Inside IR35)

Industry: Financial Services / Capital Markets / Banking

Key Responsibilities

• Configure, deploy, administer and support enterprise relational and NoSQL database platforms.
• Build and maintain database environments across development, test, staging and production.
• Automate database provisioning, configuration and deployment activities.
• Implement Infrastructure as Code and configuration management practices.
• Manage database schemas, users, roles, permissions and access controls.
• Monitor database availability, performance, capacity and operational health.
• Troubleshoot query performance, indexing, execution plans, locking, replication and connectivity issues.
• Support high availability, resilience, replication and disaster recovery.
• Participate in production incident management and root-cause analysis.
• Support database migrations, upgrades and technology modernisation initiatives.
• Work closely with application engineers, Data Architects and infrastructure teams.
• Develop reusable database engineering standards, automation and operational procedures.
• Strong hands-on database engineering / DBA experience in enterprise environments.
• Strong production experience with Oracle and PostgreSQL .
• Hands-on experience with at least one enterprise NoSQL platform such as Cassandra, MongoDB or Couchbase .
• Strong database performance tuning and troubleshooting experience.
• Experience with database provisioning, configuration, upgrades and deployment.
• Strong automation and scripting skills using technologies such as Python, Shell, Ansible or Terraform .
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and configuration management.
• Experience integrating database deployments into CI/CD pipelines .
• Strong understanding of database security, access control and vulnerability remediation.
• Experience supporting highly available, business-critical production environments.
• Strong understanding of backup/recovery, replication, resilience and disaster recovery.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work with application teams, architects and engineering functions.
• Ability to work onsite a minimum of 3 days per week in London or Burgess Hill .
• Financial Services, Banking, Capital Markets or Investment Banking experience.
• Experience with large Cassandra clusters or distributed database platforms.
• Kubernetes/containerised database environments.
• Cloud or hybrid database platforms.
• Database migration and modernisation programmes.
• Relevant database, cloud or DevOps certifications.