We are seeking a Database Reliability Engineer with a keen interest in automation and site reliability practices, to join our talented Digital team.
What we offer:
- 33 days’ annual leave with room to grow
- Highly competitive salary
- Flexible working
- Training and conference funds to keep your skills current
- Generous employee and retail discounts
- Private healthcare and sick pay cover
- Life assurance
- Workplace pension
- Maternity and paternity packages
- Simplyhealth – all employees have access to a GP 24/7 and can claim money back on medical and dental treatments
Hours
Full time hybrid working: Monday – Friday, 9am - 5pm (with on call rota)
About the Role
Arnold Clark’s Database Reliability Engineering team are responsible for ensuring our database systems are reliable, available, and performant.
As part of our DBRE team, you will manage all aspects of our on-premises SQL Server estate. This will include planning and implementing high-availability, performance monitoring and tuning, capacity planning and ensuring we have robust backup, restore and failover process. You will also play a significant role in shaping our expanding Cloud database systems.
You will work collaboratively with other cross-functional teams across Arnold Clark Digital, including our Data, DevOps, and Product Development teams. You will assist in database design, planned migrations, and pre-emptively identifying database related issues. Where there are unforeseen incidents, you will be part of the incident response.
You will have a site reliability engineering mindset, pro-actively working towards identifying problems, and engineering solutions in an automated and repeatable manner.
Finally, you will be joining a small, well-respected team as we take on some exciting new projects.
Day-to-day duties
- Ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of our database systems.
- Design and implement robust backup, restore and failover strategies, ensuring data integrity while minimising service interruption.
- Implement and extend our alerting and monitoring solutions, to identify potential issues before they occur.
- Plan for changes in capacity requirements and growth in workloads.
- Provide SQL expertise to our product engineering teams, assisting and coaching for efficient and performant use of the database.
- Participate in incident response and problem diagnosis.
- Implement automated processes to streamline database operations, configuration, and deployments.
Essential skills and experience
- In-depth Microsoft SQL Server knowledge, with a proven record of managing a SQL Server estate
- Solid understanding of always-on availability groups, security and encryption techniques such as Always Encrypted
- Hands-on experience with cloud-based relational databases, e.g., Azure SQL
For a Lead Engineer position
- Line management experience, including running one-to-one sessions
- Task management, prioritisation, and progress reporting
- Being the point of contact for cross-functional team activity and technical direction.
Desirable but not essential
- Experience with Change Data Capture (CDC) tools
- Experience with infrastructure as code tools, such as Terraform or PowerShell Desired State Configuration
Arnold Clark is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We strive to create an environment where collaboration, unique perspectives and multiple approaches are celebrated. We care about our employees and our communities, we nurture talent and encourage ambition, and we are passionate about people who take pride in their work. Our employees are at the heart of everything we do – diverse in our make-up, united in our goals.