Senior Database Administrator

About us

Over the last 18 years, we have helped over a million satisfied customers move and manage their money. Our award-winning product portfolio allows our customers to make low-cost multi-currency payments across various payment products. From travel money to transfers, currency hedging, to expense management, we are focused on a single goal of making it easy for our customers to manage and move their money.

As a business, we are committed to delivering value to our customers through the combination of advanced payments technology and personal expert service. We’re doing this by hiring exceptional people and are now looking for a Senior Database Administrator to join our team.

Within our offices in London, Chester and Los Angeles and Europe, Equals comprises of three business lines and brands - Equals Money, FairFX and Card One Money . You will join a very close-knit, talented and supportive team from various backgrounds who believe that bringing different perspectives together helps us understand our customers’ needs. United, by one thing, making money management straightforward and cost-effective for our customers.

We’re hiring a pragmatic Senior Database Administrator to own the health, performance and reliability of our fleet of ~50 Aurora MySQL clusters. You’ll work closely with engineering to keep systems running smoothly — ensuring backups and alarms are configured, capacity is right-sized, and maintenance windows and failover procedures are tested. Day-to-day you’ll profile and optimise slow queries, review and add indexes, rewrite problematic SQL, and drive performance tuning and schema-change best practices.

You’ll also automate routine checks, maintain runbooks for incidents and recovery, and partner with teams to plan migrations, capacity growth and long-term improvements.

We believe that certain skills are essential in order to be successful in this role and these are detailed below. You may not have all the other skills we have outlined as desirable, we understand that and will still welcome your application. We will carry out individual interviews for shortlisted candidates and assess who is best suited for the role after we have discussed everything with you.

• Monitor cluster health and alerts (Cloud Watch / Performance Insights / slow-query), investigate anomalies and act on incidents.
• Diagnose and optimise slow queries and problematic transactions: use EXPLAIN, rewrite queries, and add/remove indexes as needed.
• Ensure backups, snapshots and PITR are configured and tested; maintain and exercise recovery/runbook procedures.
• Perform capacity planning, sizing and maintenance (patches, minor version upgrades, failover drills) to keep performance and availability targets.
• Automate routine checks and reports (index coverage, long-running queries, replica lag, space usage) and produce actionable recommendations for engineering teams.

• Strong practical experience with MySQL / Aurora MySQL administration at production scale (schema design, replication, failover).
• Proven ability to profile and tune queries and indexes (EXPLAIN, slow-query analysis, query rewriting).
• Solid knowledge of backup & recovery strategies for Aurora (snapshots, continuous backups/PITR) and tested restore experience.
• Experience with monitoring and alerting for databases (Cloud Watch, Performance Insights, slow-query logs) and acting on alarms.
• Comfortable scripting/automation (Bash, Python, or similar) to build health checks, runbooks and operational tooling; good Linux fundamentals.
• A role model for our values:
  • Make it happen
  • Succeed together
  • Be the customer
  • Go beyond

• Familiarity with MySQL tooling such as pt-query-digest / Percona Toolkit, Proxy
  
  SQL, or similar performance/management tools.
• AWS experience or certification (Aurora/RDS internals, KMS for encryption, IAM, multi-AZ/Global DB setups).

We welcome people into Equals and desire to grow and develop our talented teams. We believe in teamwork and celebrating our successes. We strive to embrace our values. We want to put you in the driving seat of your career and achieve your full…