Senior Database Administrator

SENIOR SQL SERVER DBA This role requires you to be based in the UK and sponsorship is not available. 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, repl