Database Platform Manager

Database Platform Manager 

Company: THG Ingenuity    Location: Manchester (Head Office) 

Reports to: Director of Data   

Role Overview 

We are looking for a strong technical leader to run our database platform. 

Our estate runs on Google Cloud Platform following a recent migration to self-managed services, and there is a real opportunity here to shape the next phase. How we consolidate and modernise the estate, where managed and cloud-native services earn their place, which new technologies are worth adopting, and how the platform scales with the business are all live questions. You will lead the thinking on them and work with stakeholders across the business to agree and deliver the roadmap. 

You will lead our DBA team, who own every database across the group regardless of the application running on it and who run the platform as a 24/7 service. You will work hand in hand with our Data Reliability Engineering team, whose Principal Engineer is your peer and whose focus is automation, fleet reliability and SLOs. 

This role is weighted toward hands-on technical depth. You should be as credible in a design review or an incident bridge as you are in a planning session with senior stakeholders. 

Key Responsibilities 

Technical direction 

• The technical roadmap for the estate. We want someone genuinely interested in emerging database technologies who evaluates them on merit and can articulate the pros and cons clearly to a technical or non-technical audience 

• Own the strategy and delivery of the consolidation and modernisation programme across the estate, including sequencing, risk and making the case to the business 

• Shape the direction of the platform and the team around two priorities, high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making the trade-offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus behind them 

• Target architecture on GCP: where self-managed instances remain right and where managed and cloud-native services earn their place 

• Standards for database design, performance, high availability and disaster recovery, patching, and backup and recovery 

• Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance and query tuning, replication and failover, major incident response and post-incident review 

• Automation, infrastructure as code and database CI/CD, with everything in GitHub under proper change management, so routine change scales without scaling headcount 

Team leadership 

• Line management of the DBA team across the UK and India: 1:1s, development, performance, hiring and onboarding 

• The L1/L2/L3 operating model and the rotas that support it, including on-call, run sustainably and held as data rather than tribal knowledge 

• Growing technical depth across the team through design review, pairing and deliberate development 

• Working as a close peer to the Principal Data Reliability Engineer, with both teams operating together on automation, reliability and incident response 

Planning and stakeholders 

• Capacity and allocation planning for the team, and the trade-offs when demand exceeds supply 

• Weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership, and representing the platform in cross-functional forums 

• Agreeing modernisation priorities with stakeholders and sequencing them realistically alongside run commitments 

• Input into GCP cost forecasting and run-rate, and day-to-day management of vendor and cloud partner relationships 

Skills and Experience 

Essential 

• 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-premise infrastructure: 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 

Desirable 

• Couchbase or comparable NoSQL / document-store experience 

• CockroachDB or other distributed SQL platforms 

• Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash 

• Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate 

• Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent 

• Kafka or streaming platforms 

• Managing distributed or offshore teams 

• Regulated or high-availability environments [sector, if relevant] 

You as a Person 

• You are curious about technology and restless with the status quo. You keep an eye on where the database world is going, form a view, and are willing to argue for change when the current approach has stopped being the right one 

• You challenge constructively. You are comfortable disagreeing with a decision, including one of your own, and you do it with evidence and without making it personal 

• You give people room to grow. We have a culture that supports people stretching beyond their job description, and you create that space for your team rather than defending boundaries 

• You are pragmatic about trade-offs. You can hold resilience, cost and delivery pressure in the same conversation and make a defensible call rather than an idealistic one 

• You communicate well with people who are not database engineers. You can take a complex technical trade-off and make it land with a stakeholder who needs to make a decision, not a lecture 

• You lead from the front. You are hands-on by instinct, and your team see you in the detail with them, particularly when things are going wrong 

• You take on-call seriously as a human problem, not just a rota. Sustainable, fairly shared, and something people are supported through