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 betting and gaming company that has operated for over 50 years, founded by Fred and Peter Done. It runs more than 1,300 betting shops and employs around 9,500 people, combining a large retail estate with online sports betting and gaming. In 2019 it entered the US sports betting market as Betfred Sportsbook, now operating in several states, and has established a presence in South Africa, where it holds a majority stake in the online betting company LottoStar. Headquartered in Warrington, England, Betfred emphasises customer service and responsible gambling across its operations.