Senior Database Administrator
The Senior Database Administrator (DBA) is responsible for the delivery, maintenance and optimisation of secure, scalable and high-performance database services. The role requires deep technical expertise across infrastructure, application and reliability engineering disciplines with a focus on ensuring database environments remain stable, efficient and well-automated. The Senior DBA will work closely with the Lead DBA, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Development teams to design, implement and support resilient database solutions. The role is highly hands-on and suited to a technically driven individual with a passion for continual improvement and operational excellence.
- 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.
- Experience in MariaDB/MySQL or equivalent RDBMS environments. (required)
- Strong knowledge of database architecture, replication, partitioning and performance optimisation. (required)
- Proficiency in Linux administration and scripting (Bash, Shell or Python). (required)
- Experience with automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible or Terraform. (required)
- Proven ability to troubleshoot and resolve complex issues across database and system layers. (required)
- Familiarity with CI/CD and observability tooling. (required)
- Experience with AWS RDS or other cloud-managed database platforms. (preferred)
- Knowledge of Liquibase or similar schema migration tools. (preferred)
- Understanding of data protection, disaster recovery and retention strategies. (preferred)
- Experience with monitoring tools such as Prometheus or Grafana. (preferred)
- A competitive rate of pay and pension contribution ( £60,000 -£75,000)
- Generous discretionary bonus schemes, incentives and competitions
- An annual leave entitlement that increases with length of service
- Access to an online GP 24/7, 365 days a year for you and your immediate family.
- Employee wellbeing support through our Employee Assistance Programme
- Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay
- Long Service Recognition
- Access to a pay day savings scheme, financial coach and up to 40% of your earned wage ahead of payday, through Wagestream.
Betfred is a leading betting and gaming company that has been at the forefront of the industry for over 50 years. With over 1300 shops and 9500 employees, we are constantly pushing ourselves to innovate and improve, and we are always on the lookout for the best talent to join our team. In 2019, we entered the US sports betting market as Betfred Sportsbook, and we now operate in 10 states. We have also recently established a new presence in South Africa, with over 50 betting halls, and we own a majority stake in Lottostar, South Africa's largest online betting company. At Betfred, our mission is to provide our customers with the best possible service, products and experience while ensuring responsible gambling. We believe our employees are our greatest asset and we are committed to providing them with the training and development they need to succeed. We offer a range of career opportunities, from retail positions in our shops to roles in our head office. We are also dedicated to giving back to the communities in which we operate. Through our Betfred Supports initiative, we support a range of charities and community initiatives.