Job Specifications
Job Title: Principal Engineer - Databases
Job Description
As a Principal Engineer, you will be the senior technical authority responsible for setting the engineering direction, ensuring platform reliability, and driving innovation across a critical enterprise technology domain. You will provide deep technical leadership, shape long-term strategy, and ensure that engineering teams deliver secure, scalable, and resilient services that underpin the organisation's digital ecosystem. You will act as the highest level hands-on expert, partnering with architects, product owners, and engineering squads to define standards, modernise platforms, and embed automation and DevOps practices across all services.Responsibilities
Serve as the domain's foremost technical expert, accountable for engineering excellence and long-term platform strategy.
Define and maintain technical standards, patterns, and best practices across the domain.
Lead complex design decisions, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and aligned with enterprise architecture.
Drive adoption of automation, DevOps tooling, and platform as a product principles across all engineering teams.
Oversee the health, performance, and life cycle of core platforms within the domain.
Ensure capacity planning, resilience, backup, recovery, and disaster readiness are Embedded into all services.
Champion observability, monitoring, and proactive incident prevention.
Identify opportunities to modernise Legacy platforms, reduce technical debt, and introduce new technologies.
Evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and architectures relevant to the domain.
Lead proof of concepts and guide engineering teams through adoption.
Partner with cross-domain Principal Engineers to ensure cohesive enterprise-wide engineering standards.
Work closely with product, security, architecture, and operations teams to deliver integrated solutions.
Mentor senior engineers and uplift engineering capability across the organisation.
Ensure compliance with security, regulatory, and operational standards.
Provide technical oversight for major changes, upgrades, and transformation initiatives.
Act as an escalation point for critical incidents and complex technical challenges.
Administer and optimise Oracle databases running on Exadata and Exadata Cloud@Customer platforms.
Perform capacity planning, performance tuning, and storage optimisation for ExaCC environments.
Manage Oracle RAC, Data Guard, RMAN, and advanced Oracle features for high availability and disaster recovery.
Support patching, upgrades, and life cycle management across Oracle estates.
Deploy, configure, and maintain PostgreSQL clusters in production environments.
Implement replication, backup strategies, and failover mechanisms.
Optimise query performance, indexing strategies, and storage utilisation.
Develop automation for provisioning, monitoring, and patching PostgreSQL instances.
Manage MongoDB clusters, including sharding, replication, and scaling strategies.
Monitor and tune performance for document-based workloads.
Implement backup, restore, and disaster recovery processes for MongoDB environments.
Ensure data integrity, schema design best practices, and operational resilience.
Build automation for database provisioning, configuration, and compliance using IaC and Scripting.
Implement robust monitoring and observability for all database platforms.
Collaborate with application teams to design schemas, optimise queries, and troubleshoot performance issues.
Ensure security hardening, auditing, and adherence to data governance standards.
Participate in on-call rotations supporting critical database services.Essential Skills
Strong hands-on experience with Oracle Database and Exadata/ExaCC platforms.
Solid PostgreSQL administration skills in production environments.
Practical experience managing MongoDB clusters at scale.
Proficiency in SQL, PL/SQL, and Scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
Understanding of replication, clustering, high availability, and disaster recovery patterns.
Familiarity with database performance tuning and query optimisation.
experience with automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, Liquibase, Flyway, etc.).Additional Skills & Qualifications
experience with enterprise-grade and open-source database platforms.Why Work Here?
Join a forward-thinking organisation where innovation and technical excellence are at the heart of everything we do. You will be part of a dynamic team that values continuous learning and development, providing opportunities for career growth and advancement. We foster a collaborative and inclusive environment where your contributions are recognised and rewarded.
Work Environment
You will work in a technologically advanced environment, using cutting-edge tools and platforms. The role involves collaborating with diverse teams across the organisation, fostering a culture of innovation and agility. The position offers a flexible work schedule to support work-life balance while contributin