SQL Database Administrator & Developer

Location: Hybrid / Northampton NN4 7YE
, UK job type: Permanent / Full-time Sector and subsector: Technology | Software Development Salary: Negotiable salary

Salary : £35,000-£45,000 DOE + Bonus Hours: 37hrs, Mon-Friday Location: Hybrid working with 2-3 days a week in our Northampton Office Contract: Permanent

If you like owning a system end to end; designing it, building it, and making it faster than you found it, this is your opportunity to join a dynamic Market and one of the UK’s largest energy aggregators.

We’re looking for a Database Administrator & Developer to take ownership of the databases behind energy engine®, our platform for pricing, quoting and managing energy contracts for tens of thousands of UK businesses. You’ll build the data layer behind the products we launch next, and you’ll own the pricing infrastructure that turns raw supplier price files into live, quotable rates. It’s a hands-on build role rather than a maintenance one.

At Online Direct, we provide intermediary business and technology services for B2B brokers to access the energy market. Over the past 25 years, we have evolved our offerings to support energy brokers establish and sustain long-term, successful businesses in the industry.
We pride ourselves on our inclusive culture, shared values, team spirit and commitment to excellence, which is the cornerstone of our success and reputation.

• Design, build and optimise the database layer behind new energy engine® products and features
• Write, review and performance-tune SQL against large production datasets
• Own the pricing data pipeline end to end — ingestion, conversion, validation and upload of supplier price changes into the platform
• Automate and harden what is currently manual, reducing the time between a supplier issuing prices and those prices going live
• Build the validation checks that catch bad pricing data before it ever reaches a customer
• Administer business-critical MySQL databases: performance, indexing, backups, integrity and access control
• Maintain supplier meter mappings and the data relationships that underpin accurate quoting
• Work with our internal team and external development partner to specify, test and roll out new functionality
• Partner with the pricing team day to day — understand how they work, then build the tools that make their job easier
• Manage supplier relationships covering pricing feeds and meter mapping
• Carry out data analysis to answer commercial and technical questions, and document what you build

• Strong, demonstrable experience writing and optimising SQL — complex queries, stored procedures, and diagnosing why something is slow
• Hands-on experience administering MySQL in a production environment
• Experience working with large, business-critical datasets where accuracy genuinely matters
• Confident manipulating and validating data within Microsoft Excel
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the judgement to know when something looks wrong
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you’ll be explaining technical constraints to commercial colleagues regularly
• Comfortable owning your own workload and delivering with limited supervision
• A genuine appetite to learn new tools and languages — our stack will keep evolving

Ideal

• Python experience, particularly for data processing, automation or scripting
• Experience consuming or building REST APIs is highly desirable
• Familiarity with version control (Git) and working alongside a development team
• Experience with in the energy industry, or another regulated, data-heavy sector

Online Direct offer a range of benefits*, contributing to a well-rounded compensation package that includes financial incentives, career development opportunities and various perks designed to enhance employees quality of life and wellbeing. Here's a breakdown:

• Competitive Salary + Bonus
• 25 days annual leave, in addition to bank holidays increasing with length of service with the option to purchase additional days
• Sick Pay
• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity
• Employee Reward Schemes
• Team Incentive Days
• Death In Service (DIS)
• Health Cash Plan
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Early Friday Finish
• Cycle to Work Scheme

* subject to length of service