Database Platform Manager
LocationManchester
Posted2 hours ago
About THG Ingenuity
THG Ingenuity is a fully integrated digital commerce ecosystem, designed to power brands without limits. Our global end-to-end tech platform is comprised of three products: THG Commerce, THG Studios, THG Fulfilment.
Each represents a single, unified solution, overcoming challenges and taking brands direct-to-consumer. Our client portfolio includes globally recognised brands such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Elemis, Homebase, and Proctor & Gamble.
Database Platform Manager
Company: THG Ingenuity Location: Manchester (Head Office)
Reports to: Director of Data
Role Overview
We are looking for a strong technical leader to run our database platform.
Our estate runs on Google Cloud Platform following a recent migration to self-managed services, and there is a real opportunity here to shape the next phase. How we consolidate and modernise the estate, where managed and cloud-native services earn their place, which new technologies are worth adopting, and how the platform scales with the business are all live questions. You will lead the thinking on them and work with stakeholders across the business to agree and deliver the roadmap.
You will lead our DBA team, who own every database across the group regardless of the application running on it and who run the platform as a 24/7 service. You will work hand in hand with our Data Reliability Engineering team, whose Principal Engineer is your peer and whose focus is automation, fleet reliability and SLOs.
This role is weighted toward hands-on technical depth. You should be as credible in a design review or an incident bridge as you are in a planning session with senior stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
Technical direction
The technical roadmap for the estate. We want someone genuinely interested in emerging database technologies who evaluates them on merit and can articulate the pros and cons clearly to a technical or non-technical audience
Own the strategy and delivery of the consolidation and modernisation programme across the estate, including sequencing, risk and making the case to the business
Shape the direction of the platform and the team around two priorities, high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making the trade-offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus behind them
Target architecture on GCP: where self-managed instances remain right and where managed and cloud-native services earn their place
Standards for database design, performance, high availability and disaster recovery, patching, and backup and recovery
Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance and query tuning, replication and failover, major incident response and post-incident review
Automation, infrastructure as code and database CI/CD, with everything in GitHub under proper change management, so routine change scales without scaling headcount
Team leadership
Line management of the DBA team across the UK and India: 1:1s, development, performance, hiring and onboarding
The L1/L2/L3 operating model and the rotas that support it, including on-call, run sustainably and held as data rather than tribal knowledge
Growing technical depth across the team through design review, pairing and deliberate development
Working as a close peer to the Principal Data Reliability Engineer, with both teams operating together on automation, reliability and incident response
Planning and stakeholders
Capacity and allocation planning for the team, and the trade-offs when demand exceeds supply
Weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership, and representing the platform in cross-functional forums
Agreeing modernisation priorities with stakeholders and sequencing them realistically alongside run commitments
Input into GCP cost forecasting and run-rate, and day-to-day management of vendor and cloud partner relationships
Skills and Experience
Essential
PostgreSQL (core requirement): deep, current, hands-on expertise covering performance tuning, replication, high availability and failover, upgrades, backup and point-in-time recovery
Microsoft SQL Server: strong administration experience including Always On availability groups, clustering, query tuning and maintenance
Migration between platforms: practical experience moving production workloads between database engines, including schema and code conversion, data migration and cutover
SQL: able to write and optimise complex queries and diagnose execution plans first-hand
Google Cloud Platform: production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), and a clear view of the trade-offs between self-managed and managed services
On-premise infrastructure: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, and the realities of a hybrid estate
GitHub, CI/CD and change management: everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, and a disciplined approach to change control in a production environment
24/7 service ownership: on-call, incident and problem management, SLAs, post-incident review
Technology evaluation and influence: assessing new database technologies objectively and making a clear, evidence-based case to technical and non-technical stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost
Line management in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context
Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership
Desirable
Couchbase or comparable NoSQL / document-store experience
CockroachDB or other distributed SQL platforms
Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash
Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate
Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent
Kafka or streaming platforms
Managing distributed or offshore teams
Regulated or high-availability environments [sector, if relevant]
You as a Person
You are curious about technology and restless with the status quo. You keep an eye on where the database world is going, form a view, and are willing to argue for change when the current approach has stopped being the right one
You challenge constructively. You are comfortable disagreeing with a decision, including one of your own, and you do it with evidence and without making it personal
You give people room to grow. We have a culture that supports people stretching beyond their job description, and you create that space for your team rather than defending boundaries
You are pragmatic about trade-offs. You can hold resilience, cost and delivery pressure in the same conversation and make a defensible call rather than an idealistic one
You communicate well with people who are not database engineers. You can take a complex technical trade-off and make it land with a stakeholder who needs to make a decision, not a lecture
You lead from the front. You are hands-on by instinct, and your team see you in the detail with them, particularly when things are going wrong
You take on-call seriously as a human problem, not just a rota. Sustainable, fairly shared, and something people are supported through
THG Ingenuity is proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you are invited to interview, please let us know if there are any reasonable adjustments we can make to the recruitment process that will enable you to perform to the best of your ability.
THG Ingenuity is committed to creating a diverse & inclusive environment and hence welcomes applications from all sections of the community.
Because of the high volumes of applications our opportunities attract, it sometimes takes us time to review and consider them all. We endeavour to respond to every application we receive within 14 days. If you haven't heard from us within that time frame or should you have any specific questions about this or other applications for positions at THG Ingenuity please contact one of our Talent team to discuss further.
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THG Ingenuity is a fully integrated digital commerce ecosystem, designed to power brands without limits. Our global end-to-end tech platform is comprised of three products: THG Commerce, THG Studios, THG Fulfilment.
Each represents a single, unified solution, overcoming challenges and taking brands direct-to-consumer. Our client portfolio includes globally recognised brands such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Elemis, Homebase, and Proctor & Gamble.
Database Platform Manager
Company: THG Ingenuity Location: Manchester (Head Office)
Reports to: Director of Data
Role Overview
We are looking for a strong technical leader to run our database platform.
Our estate runs on Google Cloud Platform following a recent migration to self-managed services, and there is a real opportunity here to shape the next phase. How we consolidate and modernise the estate, where managed and cloud-native services earn their place, which new technologies are worth adopting, and how the platform scales with the business are all live questions. You will lead the thinking on them and work with stakeholders across the business to agree and deliver the roadmap.
You will lead our DBA team, who own every database across the group regardless of the application running on it and who run the platform as a 24/7 service. You will work hand in hand with our Data Reliability Engineering team, whose Principal Engineer is your peer and whose focus is automation, fleet reliability and SLOs.
This role is weighted toward hands-on technical depth. You should be as credible in a design review or an incident bridge as you are in a planning session with senior stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
Technical direction
The technical roadmap for the estate. We want someone genuinely interested in emerging database technologies who evaluates them on merit and can articulate the pros and cons clearly to a technical or non-technical audience
Own the strategy and delivery of the consolidation and modernisation programme across the estate, including sequencing, risk and making the case to the business
Shape the direction of the platform and the team around two priorities, high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making the trade-offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus behind them
Target architecture on GCP: where self-managed instances remain right and where managed and cloud-native services earn their place
Standards for database design, performance, high availability and disaster recovery, patching, and backup and recovery
Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance and query tuning, replication and failover, major incident response and post-incident review
Automation, infrastructure as code and database CI/CD, with everything in GitHub under proper change management, so routine change scales without scaling headcount
Team leadership
Line management of the DBA team across the UK and India: 1:1s, development, performance, hiring and onboarding
The L1/L2/L3 operating model and the rotas that support it, including on-call, run sustainably and held as data rather than tribal knowledge
Growing technical depth across the team through design review, pairing and deliberate development
Working as a close peer to the Principal Data Reliability Engineer, with both teams operating together on automation, reliability and incident response
Planning and stakeholders
Capacity and allocation planning for the team, and the trade-offs when demand exceeds supply
Weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership, and representing the platform in cross-functional forums
Agreeing modernisation priorities with stakeholders and sequencing them realistically alongside run commitments
Input into GCP cost forecasting and run-rate, and day-to-day management of vendor and cloud partner relationships
Skills and Experience
Essential
PostgreSQL (core requirement): deep, current, hands-on expertise covering performance tuning, replication, high availability and failover, upgrades, backup and point-in-time recovery
Microsoft SQL Server: strong administration experience including Always On availability groups, clustering, query tuning and maintenance
Migration between platforms: practical experience moving production workloads between database engines, including schema and code conversion, data migration and cutover
SQL: able to write and optimise complex queries and diagnose execution plans first-hand
Google Cloud Platform: production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), and a clear view of the trade-offs between self-managed and managed services
On-premise infrastructure: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, and the realities of a hybrid estate
GitHub, CI/CD and change management: everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, and a disciplined approach to change control in a production environment
24/7 service ownership: on-call, incident and problem management, SLAs, post-incident review
Technology evaluation and influence: assessing new database technologies objectively and making a clear, evidence-based case to technical and non-technical stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost
Line management in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context
Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership
Desirable
Couchbase or comparable NoSQL / document-store experience
CockroachDB or other distributed SQL platforms
Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash
Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate
Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent
Kafka or streaming platforms
Managing distributed or offshore teams
Regulated or high-availability environments [sector, if relevant]
You as a Person
You are curious about technology and restless with the status quo. You keep an eye on where the database world is going, form a view, and are willing to argue for change when the current approach has stopped being the right one
You challenge constructively. You are comfortable disagreeing with a decision, including one of your own, and you do it with evidence and without making it personal
You give people room to grow. We have a culture that supports people stretching beyond their job description, and you create that space for your team rather than defending boundaries
You are pragmatic about trade-offs. You can hold resilience, cost and delivery pressure in the same conversation and make a defensible call rather than an idealistic one
You communicate well with people who are not database engineers. You can take a complex technical trade-off and make it land with a stakeholder who needs to make a decision, not a lecture
You lead from the front. You are hands-on by instinct, and your team see you in the detail with them, particularly when things are going wrong
You take on-call seriously as a human problem, not just a rota. Sustainable, fairly shared, and something people are supported through
THG Ingenuity is proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you are invited to interview, please let us know if there are any reasonable adjustments we can make to the recruitment process that will enable you to perform to the best of your ability.
THG Ingenuity is committed to creating a diverse & inclusive environment and hence welcomes applications from all sections of the community.
Because of the high volumes of applications our opportunities attract, it sometimes takes us time to review and consider them all. We endeavour to respond to every application we receive within 14 days. If you haven't heard from us within that time frame or should you have any specific questions about this or other applications for positions at THG Ingenuity please contact one of our Talent team to discuss further.
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