Hybrid Lead Database Engineer

Posted last month

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About the role

  • Design, implement and validate high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies (clustering, Always On, log shipping, replication, multi-AZ).
  • Build and maintain capacity planning models for storage, CPU, memory and IOPS.
  • Run regular failover, backup and restore drills to ensure readiness.
  • Automate provisioning, patching, upgrades and schema migrations using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Replace manual DBA runbooks with automated workflows and self-healing scripts.
  • Build tooling to enforce consistency in schema changes and DB configuration.
  • Define and monitor SLIs/SLOs for databases: query latency, replication lag, backup success and transaction throughput.
  • Build detailed dashboards and real-time alerts (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
  • Lead incident response for database outages, ensure blameless post-mortems and continuous improvement.
  • Enforce database security best practices (encryption at rest/in transit, RBAC, auditing).
  • Embed compliance checks (GDPR, HIPAA-equivalent for AU health) into deployment pipelines.
  • Work with InfoSec to align database hardening standards across environments.
  • Partner with developers to design efficient schemas and optimise queries before release.
  • Provide coaching and guidance to engineers on database reliability practices.
  • Share learnings across global engineering teams through brown-bags, playbooks and post-mortems.
  • Ensure MS SQL, Informix and PostgreSQL platforms run at peak efficiency, scale reliably and recover under failure.
  • Ensure customers’ mission-critical workloads are performant, resilient and secure.

Requirements

  • Proven experience running SQL Server in production at scale.
  • Strong grasp of query execution plans, transaction isolation levels, concurrency control and deadlock detection.
  • Hands-on knowledge of indexing strategies, partitioning and storage optimisation.
  • Experience designing HA/DR solutions and validating them through drills and failover tests.
  • Ability to forecast capacity and plan proactively for growth.
  • Strong track record of reducing incidents by engineering reliability into the system.
  • Experience automating DBA workflows (backups, restores, migrations, patching) with IaC and scripting.
  • Proficiency in scripting/programming (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go) for database operations.
  • Comfort working with CI/CD pipelines to safely roll out schema changes and configuration updates.
  • Expertise in tuning databases that support high-transaction systems.
  • Hands-on experience with benchmarking tools and methods to validate improvements.
  • Ability to design and implement monitoring to catch regressions before they impact customers.
  • Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, able to partner with DBAs, developers and SREs alike.
  • Clear communicator who can explain deep technical findings in business-relevant terms.
  • Passion for sharing knowledge and raising the bar across the organisation.
  • Expertise in-depth query and index analysis using execution plans and performance counters.
  • Knowledge to tune queries, schemas and indexing strategies to reduce latency and increase throughput.
  • Experience in workload benchmarking and stress testing under realistic concurrency and volume.
  • Record of identifying and remediating database anti-patterns (e.g., long-running transactions, blocking chains, deadlocks).

Benefits

  • Inclusive, safe and welcoming environment with opportunities to grow
  • Days of Difference volunteer leave
  • Flexible Work — support to work from home and come into offices occasionally
  • Technology and tools to support remote work
  • Equal opportunity employer and encouragement of diversity, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander applicants

Job title

Lead Database Engineer

Job type

Experience level

Senior

Salary

Not specified

Degree requirement

No Education Requirement

Location requirements

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