London Insurance Life on cord

London Insurance Life

Senior Database Platform Engineer

External position
London, UK
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Posted
a week ago
Checked
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2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Database Engineer
Experience level: Senior
Core skills considered: SQL Server, Azure, PostgreSQL
Other skills considered: PowerShell, Python

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
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

We are looking for a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms.

This is not a traditional ticket-driven DBA role. While you'll be responsible for keeping our SQL Server and Azure SQL estate healthy, secure and performant, you'll also help modernise our data platforms and support our transition towards PostgreSQL, cloud-native database services and modern lakehouse architectures.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll be troubleshooting performance issues, validating recovery strategies, automating operational processes, improving observability and helping shape the future of our database estate.

You will act as the team's database SME, working closely with Platform Engineers, Data Engineers and Operations teams to ensure critical data services remain resilient, scalable and fit for future needs.


What You'll Actually Do

Database Engineering & Operations (40%)

  • Own the operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms
  • Provision, configure and maintain production and non-production database environments
  • Plan and execute upgrades, patching and platform lifecycle activities
  • Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infrastructure, workloads and application interactions
  • Establish and maintain database operational standards and engineering practices
  • Manage platform capacity, utilisation and performance forecasting
  • Ensure critical database platforms remain secure, resilient and operationally supportable

Resilience, Recovery & Reliability (25%)

  • Design, implement and validate backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities
  • Own restore testing and recovery readiness across critical platforms
  • Support high availability solutions and service resilience initiatives
  • Implement proactive monitoring, alerting and observability for database services
  • Participate in incident response, problem management and post-incident reviews
  • Drive continual improvement through automation, root cause analysis and operational learning
  • Reduce operational toil through self-healing and automation where practical

Database Modernisation (15%)

  • Support the evolution of the database estate towards PostgreSQL and modern cloud-native database services
  • Define and improve database deployment, configuration and operational standards
  • Contribute to migration and modernisation initiatives across legacy database platforms
  • Help reduce technical debt through platform simplification and standardisation
  • Evaluate new database technologies and operating models where they create business value

Data Platform Integration (10%)

  • Support integration between database platforms, Databricks and analytics services
  • Work alongside Data Engineers to optimise data movement and workload performance
  • Contribute database expertise to modern data platform initiatives
  • Help ensure database services can support emerging analytics and AI workloads

Security, Governance & Compliance (10%)

  • Implement and maintain role-based access controls and database security standards
  • Support audit, compliance and governance activities
  • Manage database access processes and periodic reviews
  • Ensure database services align with organisational security and operational policies
  • Produce operational evidence and documentation where required for regulatory and audit purposes

What We Need From You

Required

  • 5+ years database engineering or DBA experience supporting production platforms
  • Strong SQL Server expertise including administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting and optimisation
  • Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services
  • High Availability and Disaster Recovery experience including backup, restore and recovery planning
  • Experience managing business-critical production services
  • Strong troubleshooting skills across database, infrastructure and application interactions
  • Monitoring and observability experience within enterprise environments
  • Automation experience using PowerShell, Python or similar scripting languages
  • Strong understanding of database security, access control and governance
  • Experience working within structured incident, problem and change management processes

Strongly Preferred

  • PostgreSQL administration and engineering experience
  • Experience supporting enterprise data warehouse environments
  • Databricks administration or integration experience
  • Azure cloud platform experience
  • Infrastructure-as-Code familiarity (Terraform or Bicep)
  • Experience with modern monitoring and observability platforms
  • Experience supporting cloud migration or database modernisation programmes
  • Knowledge of lakehouse architectures and modern analytics platforms

What Actually Matters

  • Reliability mindset - you understand databases are critical infrastructure and treat them accordingly
  • Operational excellence - prevention is always better than firefighting
  • Pragmatism over purity - you choose the right solution, not the fashionable one
  • Automation-first thinking - eliminate repetitive manual work wherever possible
  • Continuous improvement - you leave systems better than you found them
  • Documentation discipline - knowledge should be shared, not hidden
  • Collaboration skills - you work effectively across engineering, operations and data teams
  • Ownership mentality - you see problems through to resolution
Senior Database Platform Engineer at London Insurance Life
Position posted a week ago

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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
Alex Yeates on cord
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