Senior Database Specialist

Hours:

Full time Hybrid Working Closing Date:
Mon, 21 Sept 2026 As we continue to modernise and transform our digital services, we have an exciting opportunity for a Senior Database Engineer with a proven track record of designing, administering and evolving business-critical database platforms. As a Senior Database Engineer, you will be part of a supportive and highly skilled platform team responsible for delivering secure, resilient and automated database services across our technology estate.

You will bring deep technical expertise across database technologies, operational excellence, automation and platform engineering practices, helping to ensure our data services remain reliable, scalable, secure and cost-effective. Using your experience and knowledge from both internal and external sources, you will support and mentor other engineers, establish best practices, and drive continuous improvement across our database platforms. You will play a key role in shaping the future direction of our database and data platform capabilities, ensuring they meet the evolving needs of the organisation while maintaining high standards of governance, performance and operational resilience.

At Skipton, we're founded on fairness. We exist to do right by our members - and we believe that starts with doing right by our people. So whoever you are and whatever you bring, there's a place for you here and a genuine plan for where you go next.

• Designing, deploying and evolving highly available, secure and scalable database platforms.
• Shaping database architecture, standards and engineering practices to support current and future business needs.
• Leading improvements in database automation, infrastructure as code, deployment pipelines and operational tooling.
• Driving platform reliability through proactive monitoring, performance optimisation, capacity management and resilience testing.
• Investigating and resolving complex database incidents, conducting root cause analysis and implementing preventative measures.
• Establishing and maintaining database governance, security controls, backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Working closely with engineering, architecture and delivery teams to ensure data platforms are easy to consume, operate and support.
• Mentoring Database Engineers and other technical colleagues, sharing knowledge and coaching best practices.
• Participation in a rotating on-call schedule, acting as an escalation point for critical platform incidents and contributing to the operational excellence and resilience of our cloud services.
• Contributing to communities of practice and helping raise engineering maturity across the organisation.
• Identifying opportunities to reduce operational overhead through automation, standardisation and continuous improvement initiatives.

• Extensive experience administering enterprise database platforms such as Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL, Managed Instance or similar technologies.
• Strong understanding of database architecture, performance tuning, high availability and disaster recovery.
• Experience designing and implementing backup, restore and business continuity solutions.
• Proven ability to automate database administration tasks using Power Shell, Python, SQL scripting or similar technologies.
• Experience implementing Infrastructure as Code and database deployment automation.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving skills with the ability to manage complex technical incidents.
• Knowledge of database security principles, governance controls and regulatory requirements.
• Ability to balance technical excellence with pragmatic business outcomes.
• Experience mentoring and supporting engineers and technical teams.
• Ideally experience with Azure data services, including Azure SQL, Managed Instance, Cosmos DB or Azure PostgreSQL, or other cloud environments.
• Familiarity with Dev Ops practices, CI/CD pipelines and modern engineering methodologies.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms.
• Knowledge of data platform technologies, analytics services or data engineering practices.

• Your work matters. And the way we reward you matters,…