Lead Database Developer

Location: Anwick

Lead Database Developer Salary £55,000 to £60,000 depending on experience Permanent Folkestone Hybrid As our new Lead Database Developer, you will be the senior technical specialist responsible for improving the performance, scalability, and engineering quality of Saga's Customer Hub data solution. The Customer Hub is a critical strategic platform sitting at the very heart of Saga with over 10 million customer records and is constantly growing.

As we continue to serve more customers and embark on new and exciting partnerships as part of our wider growth strategy, your role in sustaining this high-performing database is crucial to our success. This database supports customer data management, customer matching, partner integrations, data processing, and customer data distribution across Saga's technology landscape. This role helps ensure that data solutions are designed and optimised to support efficient, secure, and scalable customer data capabilities.

You'll act as a technical authority for Customer Hub data engineering and performance optimisation, driving best practice, supporting delivery teams, and ensuring the platform continues to support strategic business initiatives, partner integrations, and customer data quality objectives. We work in a hybrid way at Saga, both at home and in the office. This role requires you to be working from our Folkestone office at least once a week, allowing us to collaborate and share success as a business.

Package Description At Saga we recognise that our people make us special. We believe our colleagues deserve rewards for the excellence they demonstrate every single day, that's why we have put together an amazing benefits package for all colleagues. BENEFITS AVAILABLE FOR THIS ROLE: 25 days holiday  bank holidays Option to purchase additional leave - 5 extra days Pension scheme matched up to 10% Company performance related annual bonus - Up to 5% Life assurance policy on joining us, 4 x salary Wellbeing programme Colleague discounts including family discounts on cruises, holidays and insurance Range of reductions and offers from leading retailers, travel groups and entertainment companies Enhanced maternity and paternity leave Grandparents leave Income protection Access to Saga Academy, our bespoke learning platform Main Responsibilities As our Lead Database Developer, you will provide expert guidance on database technologies, lead complex development initiatives, and ensure the reliability, performance, and continual improvement of our data platforms.

Other accountabilities will include:
• Investigating performance bottlenecks across customer data processing and integration flows.
• Improving SQL code, stored procedures, and data-processing logic to support efficient delivery.
• Leading complex performance analysis activities and translate findings into practical engineering improvements.
• Supporting delivery teams in shaping efficient data models, data flows, and integration patterns.
• Helping ensure customer data services are engineered to meet performance, security, and quality expectations.
• Providing technical input into solution decisions that affect data quality, partner integrations, and strategic delivery.
• Identifying opportunities to improve the efficiency of customer data processing and storage usage.
• Supporting data lifecycle and retention requirements through well-designed engineering approaches.
• Assessing data growth trends and recommend design improvements to support future scalability.
• Developing and improving automated deployment and validation approaches for data changes.
• Supporting integration of data change delivery within CI/CD pipelines
• Implementing automation to improve delivery quality, repeatability,…