Principal Data Platform Engineer

Job content

• Technical lead on specification, sizing and implementation of a broad range of database technologies (MS-SQL, MongoDB, Oracle, InfluxDB, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, memcached), ensuring secure, high performing, scalable services to the business.
• Collaboration with Business, Data and Solution Architects around BI, Analytics or data integration projects across platforms and datastores, analysing requirements before defining future states and transition paths.
• Undertaking operational and automation activities to keep platforms operating at their best and aligned with industry best practice (infrastructure as code, monitoring, alerting, reporting, security, updates, standards) including database backup & recovery and replication of database systems over various sites.
• Identifying and developing opportunities to provide continuous service improvement and enhanced customer experience, by optimising the performance of our database systems and/or increasing their resilience.
• Working with our different domain-specific software development teams to optimize code and stored procedures ensuring integrity, performance and security of the database is maintained.
• Identifying and implementing opportunities for data integration across platforms and data stores.
• Accountability for database security and compliance, and ensuring appropriate controls are in place and adhered to.
• Providing and coordinating critical / on-call response to major incidents and failures, identifying issues proactively or during break-fix, restoring service, analysing the root cause, learning from failure.
• Instilling best practice and standards to adhere to already established processes around ITSM disciplines such as change and risk management.
• Performing in-depth assessments and documentation of all systems and platforms to align to standard support models and identifying areas of improvement, ensuring High Quality and Excellence throughout all activity and deliverables.
• Guiding and sharing knowledge and best-practice technical experience to others in the team and advocating the best way to provide technical solutions.
• Recording and communicating team progress and time allocation as part of existing processes, coordinating, and taking ownership of workstreams & priorities.
  
  

• Extensive experience of implementing and managing various database technologies including SQL, NoSQL, time-series, message brokers, data warehouses, data lakes.
• Detailed experience with implementing and troubleshooting database replication, reporting and integration services, BI capabilities & solutions (e.g PowerBI, Spotfire).
• Experience with underlying clustering and operating system implementation and support (Windows Server, Linux).
• Knowledge of cloud-based alternatives and offerings to complement on-premises infrastructures.
• Experience managing and operating via command line utilities and working to improve automation and enlist modern practises (DevOps, CI/CD, Ansible, Kubernetes etc.).
• Ideally, backed up by vendor certifications (e.g. Microsoft, Linux).
• Experience of leading a technical or project team of some form would be advantageous.
  
  

• A practical individual who is also comfortable strategising and dividing their time between project work, support, and maintenance, and able to work both independently and within a highly collaborative team.
• Organised and initiative-taking, able to communicate clearly, and willing to take ownership and accountability for their work in current and future platforms and processes.
• Keen to use intuition to perform deeper analysis of problems outside of initial skills and knowledge.
• Experience of working in a fast-paced environment with continual demands and changing priorities.
• Confident and with proven ability to execute operations and changes within an ITIL environment.
• Calm under pressure and able to retain focus during difficult break-fix / downtime scenarios.