SQL DBA Team Lead

About Ekco

Founded in 2016, Ekco has quickly become one of Europe’s fastest-growing cloud solution providers and your trusted security-first Managed Service Provider. IT leaders choose Ekco to drive operational efficiency, scale smarter and stay ahead of risk – powered by local expertise, delivered at European scale. We specialise in helping organisations advance their cloud maturity guiding transformation, strengthening security, and maximising the value of their technology investments.

In simple terms: we help organisations modernise with confidence securing their systems, optimising their cloud, and keeping them resilient in a rapidly changing world. Today, we’re a thriving team of 1,000+ talented and supportive colleagues across the UK, Ireland, Benelux, South Africa, and Malaysia—and we’re continuing to grow. At Ekco, How We Work Matters As Much As What We Deliver.

Our People Live By Four Core Values That Shape Everything We Do.

• On It:
  We take ownership, follow through, and get things done.
• All In :
  We collaborate, support each other, and commit fully to shared goals.
• Connected:
  We build trusted relationships with colleagues, clients, and partners.
• Hungry to Grow:
  We stay curious, keep learning, and push ourselves to the next level.

Ekco is seeking an experienced SQL Server DBA to lead its Managed SQL Service function. The Lead DBA serves as the technical authority for the practice, acting as the senior escalation point for incidents, service requests, and project delivery. The role is responsible for ensuring customer SQL Server estates are managed, maintained, and optimised to the highest standards of availability, performance, security, and compliance.

• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and guidance to other DBAs and engineers within the Managed SQL Service team.
• Ensure contracted SLAs and service commitments are consistently met, and act early where they are at risk.
• Manage the team's queue and workload distribution, balancing reactive tickets, planned work and project commitments.
• Ensure documentation, runbooks and configuration records are accurate and kept current for every client.
• Maintain proactive health checking, capacity planning and performance baselining across the estate.
• Attend customer service reviews and present technical findings, risks, and recommendations to client stakeholders.
• Support presales: scoping database work, sizing effort, contributing to proposals and statements of work.
• Lead the technical onboarding of new clients: discovery, health check, remediation plan and transition into managed service.
• Plan and lead database installations, upgrades, patching, migrations, refreshes, and decommissioning following controlled change management.
• Participate in an on-call rota to support a 24/7 managed service.

• Substantial hands‑on SQL Server administration experience across multiple versions (2012 through to current releases)
• Deep working knowledge of high availability and disaster recovery:
  Always On Availability Groups, Windows Failover Clustering, FCIs, log shipping and replication
• Strong backup and recovery expertise, including backup to URL/blob storage, point‑in‑time recovery and full restore testing.
• Experience configuring and troubleshooting Transactional Replication
• Solid understanding of networking, Windows Server operating systems, and core infrastructure services such as Active Directory and DNS.
• Demonstrable performance tuning ability: execution plan analysis, wait statistics, Query Store, indexing strategy, statistics and query rewriting.
• Strong security administration experience, including authentication models, permissions, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), Always Encrypted, auditing, and vulnerability…