Job Title: Senior Database Administrator (AWS, Aurora and RDS)
Location: London, Croydon
Clearance required: Active SC
Duration: 4 months
Role Overview
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior DBA with deep expertise in AWS Aurora, Amazon RDS and PostgreSQL to lead the design, operation, optimisation, resilience, and recovery of critical database platforms. The successful candidate will be a hands-on technical expert, actively involved in architecture decisions, database design, performance tuning, data reconciliation, and operational support.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture, design, and implementation of enterprise database solutions on AWS.
- Design and maintain database schemas, data models, indexing strategies, and database standards.
- Drive database resilience, high availability, disaster recovery, and business continuity capabilities.
- Define, implement, and test backup, recovery, failover, and disaster recovery processes.
- Actively participate in architecture reviews, technical governance, and design authority decisions.
- Optimise database performance through query tuning, execution plan analysis, indexing, and configuration improvements.
- Provide hands-on troubleshooting and resolution of complex production issues.
- Perform data reconciliation, integrity validation, and root cause analysis of data discrepancies.
- Manage database upgrades, patching, security, monitoring, and capacity management.
- Work closely with architects, developers, cloud engineers, and operational teams to deliver scalable and resilient solutions.
- Produce and maintain technical documentation, standards, and operational procedures.
Essential Skills & Experience
- Expert knowledge of AWS Aurora, Amazon RDS, PostgreSQL
- Strong database architecture and solution design experience.
- Proven experience designing highly available and resilient database platforms.
- Extensive SQL development, query optimisation, and performance tuning expertise.
- Strong knowledge of database schema design, indexing, and data modelling.
- Experience with database backup, recovery, replication, failover, and disaster recovery.
- Hands-on experience troubleshooting large-scale production database environments.
- Experience leading data reconciliation and data quality activities.
- Strong understanding of AWS services including IAM, CloudWatch, KMS, VPC, and Secrets Manager.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation) and CI/CD practices.
- Strong stakeholder management, communication, and leadership skills.
Desirable
- AWS Database Specialty or AWS Solutions Architect certification.
- Experience with MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, or Redis.
- Experience working in highly regulated or public sector environments.
Candidate Profile
- The successful candidate will be a recognised database SME who combines strategic architecture leadership with strong hands-on technical delivery. They will drive resilience and recovery capabilities, influence architecture decisions, and ensure database platforms are secure, scalable, performant, and operationally robust.