Database Platform Manager

About THG Ingenuity

THG Ingenuity is a fully integrated digital commerce ecosystem, designed to power brands without limits. Our global end-to-end tech platform is comprised of three products: THG Commerce, THG Studios, THG Fulfilment.

Each represents a single, unified solution, overcoming challenges and taking brands direct-to-consumer. Our client portfolio includes globally recognised brands such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Elemis, Homebase, and Proctor & Gamble.

Database Platform Manager

Company: THG Ingenuity Location: Manchester (Head Office)

Reports to: Director of Data

Role Overview

We are looking for a strong technical leader to run our database platform.

Our estate runs on Google Cloud Platform following a recent migration to self‑managed services, and there is a real opportunity here to shape the next phase. How we consolidate and modernise the estate, where managed and cloud‑native services earn their place, which new technologies are worth adopting, and how the platform scales with the business are all live questions. You will lead the thinking on them and work with stakeholders across the business to agree and deliver the roadmap.

You will lead our DBA team, who own every database across the group regardless of the application running on it and who run the platform as a 24/7 service. You will work hand in hand with our Data Reliability Engineering team, whose Principal Engineer is your peer and whose focus is automation, fleet reliability and SLOs.

This role is weighted toward hands‑on technical depth. You should be as credible in a design review or an incident bridge as you are in a planning session with senior stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Technical direction

The technical roadmap for the estate. We want someone genuinely interested in emerging database technologies who evaluates them on merit and can articulate the pros and cons clearly to a technical or non‑technical audience

Own the strategy and delivery of the consolidation and modernisation programme across the estate, including sequencing, risk and making the case to the business

Shape the direction of the platform and the team around two priorities, high resiliency and cost effectiveness, making the trade‑offs explicit and building stakeholder consensus behind them

Target architecture on GCP: where self‑managed instances remain right and where managed and cloud‑native services earn their place

Standards for database design, performance, high availability and disaster recovery, patching, and backup and recovery

Senior escalation point for complex L3 work: performance and query tuning, replication and failover, major incident response and post‑incident review

Automation, infrastructure as code and database CI/CD, with everything in GitHub under proper change management, so routine change scales without scaling headcount

Team leadership

Line management of the DBA team across the UK and India: 1:1s, development, performance, hiring and onboarding

The L1/L2/L3 operating model and the rotas that support it, including on‑call, run sustainably and held as data rather than tribal knowledge

Growing technical depth across the team through design review, pairing and deliberate development

Working as a close peer to the Principal Data Reliability Engineer, with both teams operating together on automation, reliability and incident response

Planning and stakeholders

Capacity and allocation planning for the team, and the trade‑offs when demand exceeds supply

Weekly status and RAG reporting to senior leadership, and representing the platform in cross‑functional forums

Agreeing modernisation priorities with stakeholders and sequencing them realistically alongside run commitments

Input into GCP cost forecasting and run‑rate, and day‑to‑day management of vendor and cloud partner relationships

Skills and Experience

Essential

PostgreSQL (core requirement): deep, current, hands‑on expertise covering performance tuning, replication, high availability and failover, upgrades, backup and point‑in‑time recovery

Microsoft SQL Server: strong administration experience including Always On availability groups, clustering, query tuning and maintenance

Migration between platforms: practical experience moving production workloads between database engines, including schema and code conversion, data migration and cutover

SQL: able to write and optimise complex queries and diagnose execution plans first‑hand

Google Cloud Platform: production database workloads in GCP (Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, persistent storage, networking, IAM), and a clear view of the trade‑offs between self‑managed and managed services

On‑premise infrastructure: servers, storage, networking and virtualisation, and the realities of a hybrid estate

GitHub, CI/CD and change management: everything in source control, automated pipelines for database change, and a disciplined approach to change control in a production environment

24/7 service ownership: on‑call, incident and problem management, SLAs, post‑incident review

Technology evaluation and influence: assessing new database technologies objectively and making a clear, evidence‑based case to technical and non‑technical stakeholders, balancing resilience against cost

Line management in an infrastructure, DBA or SRE context

Capacity planning and reporting into senior leadership

Desirable

Couchbase or comparable NoSQL / document‑store experience

CockroachDB or other distributed SQL platforms

Automation and IaC: Terraform, Ansible, Python / PowerShell / Bash

Database CI/CD tooling: Flyway, Liquibase or Redgate

Database observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Cloud Monitoring or equivalent

Kafka or streaming platforms

Managing distributed or offshore teams

Regulated or high‑availability environments [sector, if relevant]

You as a Person

You are curious about technology and restless with the status quo. You keep an eye on where the database world is going, form a view, and are willing to argue for change when the current approach has stopped being the right one

You challenge constructively. You are comfortable disagreeing with a decision, including one of your own, and you do it with evidence and without making it personal

You give people room to grow. We have a culture that supports people stretching beyond their job description, and you create that space for your team rather than defending boundaries

You are pragmatic about trade‑offs. You can hold resilience, cost and delivery pressure in the same conversation and make a defensible call rather than an idealistic one

You communicate well with people who are not database engineers. You can take a complex technical trade‑off and make it land with a stakeholder who needs to make a decision, not a lecture

You lead from the front. You are hands‑on by instinct, and your team see you in the detail with them, particularly when things are going wrong

You take on‑call seriously as a human problem, not just a rota. Sustainable, fairly shared, and something people are supported through

THG Ingenuity is proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you are invited to interview, please let us know if there are any reasonable adjustments we can make to the recruitment process that will enable you to perform to the best of your ability.

THG Ingenuity is committed to creating a diverse & inclusive environment and hence welcomes applications from all sections of the community.

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