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Lead Forensics on cord

Lead Forensics

Senior SQL Server DBA - SaaS production systems

Western Rd, Cosham, Portsmouth PO6 3EN, UK
Remote in UK
Software Development
Lead Forensics is software for turbo-charged lead generation.
Active
20 hours ago
Responds to
100% of requests
Responds in
a day
Requests
0 pending
Conversations
1 started

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Database Engineer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: SQL Server

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 4 remote days p/w), Remote (~ monthly office visits)
Work from: Within United Kingdom
Working Timezones: (UTC) London +/- 2 hours
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Senior SQL Server DBA

About Lead Forensics

Lead Forensics is a rapidly growing SaaS leader in the B2B sales and marketing space. We are seeking an accomplished Senior SQL Server Database Administrator to join our engineering organisation. In this key role, you will partner with our existing DBA to manage, optimise, and protect the database platforms powering our customer-facing products and critical internal systems.

 
Role Overview

As a Senior SQL Server DBA, you will have end-to-end responsibility for our core Microsoft SQL Server estate and our expanding cloud database environment, including SingleStore. You’ll drive production operations, performance engineering, availability, security, automation, and lifecycle management for both transactional and analytical workloads.

 

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced, pragmatic, and hands-on DBA who excels in technical leadership and is passionate about service quality. You’ll closely collaborate with software engineering, architecture, infrastructure, and security teams to maintain robust existing databases and modernise delivery with cloud and DevOps practices.

 
Key Responsibilities
  • Collaborate with the current DBA to administer, monitor, and support all production and non-production Microsoft SQL Server instances and cloud database services, including SingleStore.

  • Ensure the highest levels of availability, reliability, performance, scalability, and security for our business-critical SaaS workloads.

  • Take ownership of proactive monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and health reporting; identifying trends and addressing risks before they affect customers.

  • Diagnose and resolve complex issues including queries, blocking, deadlocks, resource contention, storage, replication, and connectivity, and contribute to root-cause analysis and permanent solutions.

  • Tune queries, indexes, execution plans, schemas, and configurations, working alongside developers to maximize application performance and data access efficiency.

  • Design, manage, and regularly test robust backup, restore, high-availability, and disaster-recovery processes aligned with recovery objectives.

  • Protect database security through least-privilege access, intelligent role design, encryption, auditing, vulnerability management, and regular access reviews in line with ISO 27001 standards.

  • Plan and lead database installations, upgrades, patching, migrations, refreshes, and decommissioning following controlled change management and validation procedures.

  • Automate repeatable administration, monitoring, and deployment tasks using T-SQL, scripting, and infrastructure or CI/CD pipeline tools.

  • Support and review database changes throughout the software delivery lifecycle, ensuring safe releases using mature DevOps practices.

  • Maintain up-to-date runbooks, architecture records, operational documentation, and knowledge sharing to reduce key-person dependency.

  • Participate in a structured on-call/out-of-hours rota to support critical production services and planned maintenance.

 
About You

Experience & Background

  • 8+ years of experience administering business-critical production databases, with significant recent experience in a senior DBA role.

  • Strong, hands-on expertise with Microsoft SQL Server, including installation, configuration, upgrades, patching, backups, recovery, security, and performance tuning.

  • Proven experience supporting high-volume OLTP systems and large datasets in demanding 24×7 environments, ideally SaaS.

  • Advanced knowledge of SQL Server high-availability and disaster-recovery (HA/DR) options, such as Always On Availability Groups, clustering, replication, log shipping, and performing tested restores.

  • Experience working effectively with software engineers, platform teams, and information security professionals across distributed teams.

 

Technical & Methodological Strengths

  • Expert-level T-SQL skills, with deep understanding of execution plans, indexing, statistics, locking, isolation levels, and query optimization.

  • Solid experience in database observability, baselining, and troubleshooting with native and third-party monitoring tools.

  • Demonstrated ability to automate operational tasks using scripting, source control, and CI/CD pipelines.

  • Hands-on experience managing databases in Azure or AWS, including managed services, resilient architecture, monitoring, and cost control.

  • Experience with SingleStore or a distributed SQL platform—or the drive and aptitude to quickly build expertise here.

  • Strong understanding of data modeling, schema design, partitioning, lifecycle management, and the differing needs of OLTP and analytical workloads.

  • Excellent knowledge of secure database operation, privacy, auditing, and change management in a regulated environment.

 

Mindset & Style

  • Calm, methodical, and accountable during production incidents with a strong sense of ownership for service reliability.

  • Highly analytical, with the ability to transition between detailed troubleshooting, long-term improvement, and commercial priorities.

  • Proactive about reducing manual effort through automation, standardization, and operational controls.

  • Clear communicator capable of translating database risks, trade-offs, and recommendations for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

  • Committed to continuous learning and adopting new database technologies when they create meaningful value.

 
Ideal Candidate Will Demonstrate
  • A strong record of improving the reliability and performance of complex production SQL Server environments supporting SaaS products.

  • Evidence of incident prevention through monitoring, capacity planning, disciplined operational practices, and proactive improvements.

  • Experience managing successful database migrations or modernization projects with minimal service disruption and robust rollback plans.

  • The ability to constructively challenge database designs and collaborate with engineering to balance performance, resilience, speed, and cost.

  • Relevant Microsoft, cloud, or database certifications are welcomed, but demonstrable expertise is paramount.

 
Why Join Lead Forensics?
  • Senior, hands-on role with significant influence over the reliability and evolution of our core data platforms.

  • Opportunity to work with both established SQL Server services and innovative cloud database technologies like SingleStore.

  • Collaborate with talented engineering, architecture, infrastructure, and security professionals at scale.

  • Be part of a fast-paced, forward-thinking company focused on delivering high-performance, commercially effective SaaS solutions.

  • Remote-first culture with occasional onsite collaboration.

 
What We Offer
  • Employment with a rapidly growing UK SaaS company.

  • Remote role (hybrid working in our Cosham office available if preferred) with availability to visit for occasional in-person workshops.

  • Competitive salary and benefits.

  • Exceptional company culture—displaying strong DNA, a “One Team” ethos, and focus on growth.

  • Opportunities to give back through volunteer days, fundraisers, and charity events.

 

#productiondba #SQLServerdba

Company Benefits

  • An entrepreneurial environment built on ownership, accountability, autonomy and trust

  • Employment with a fast-growing UK SaaS company; initially remote working.

  • Competitive salary and benefits.

  • Be part of a fantastic company culture; we all display our Company DNA’s, foster a “One Team” and ‘Growth’ mentality.

  • Give back to the wider community with volunteer days, fundraisers and charity.

Interview Process

Screening call
Tech Test
Interviews 1 & 2
Bar Raiser
That's it !

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
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