Senior Database Engineer Job Description and Responsibilities

The Senior Database Engineer leads the design, optimisation and reliability of an organisation's database systems. Experienced database engineers who excel at architecture, performance tuning, incident management and mentoring should apply.

Senior Database Engineer Job Profile

The Senior Database Engineer is responsible for ensuring data integrity, availability and performance across production and non production environments. This role provides technical leadership on database architecture, capacity planning and long term maintainability of data assets.

The postholder collaborates with development, operations and security teams to define standards, drive best practice and implement robust operational processes. The role requires a pragmatic approach to problem solving and an ability to translate business requirements into scalable data solutions.

Senior Database Engineer Job Description

The Senior Database Engineer will design and refine database schemas, implement performance enhancements and direct initiatives to improve resilience and recovery. The role involves proactive monitoring, root cause analysis of incidents and the delivery of improvements to reduce risk and operational load.

This role operates within a cross functional delivery environment and is expected to influence technical roadmaps, participate in change control and contribute to capacity forecasting. The Senior Database Engineer will produce clear documentation, support deployments and mentor less experienced engineers to raise the overall capability of the team.

Senior Database Engineer: Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and review database schemas to meet functional and non functional requirements
• Optimise queries and schema design to improve application performance and reduce resource consumption
• Develop and maintain backup, recovery and disaster recovery strategies
• Implement and maintain high availability and replication patterns to meet uptime targets
• Perform capacity planning and forecasting for storage and compute requirements
• Monitor database health, diagnose issues and lead incident response and remediation
• Define and enforce database security standards, access controls and data protection practices
• Automate routine operational tasks to improve reliability and reduce manual intervention
• Collaborate with application teams on data migrations, deployments and schema changes
• Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks and operational run procedures
• Conduct performance tuning and benchmarking for new and existing systems
• Lead or participate in architecture reviews and technical design sessions
• Mentor and coach junior database engineers and share knowledge across teams
• Evaluate new approaches to data management and recommend improvements to processes

Senior Database Engineer: Requirements and Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information systems or a related discipline, or equivalent experience
• Substantial professional experience working with complex database systems in production environments
• Proven expertise in database design, data modelling and schema optimisation
• Strong skills in query performance tuning and diagnostic analysis
• Experience implementing backup, recovery and disaster recovery processes
• Knowledge of high availability, replication and clustering concepts
• Understanding of database security principles and access control mechanisms
• Experience with capacity planning and performance benchmarking
• Proven ability to lead incident response and perform root cause analysis
• Good scripting or automation skills to support operational tasks
• Excellent communication skills and experience working with cross functional teams
• Ability to document technical designs and operational procedures clearly
• Proven mentoring or leadership experience within technical teams