Job Description

The Opportunity

Embedded Payments runs a group of payments platforms serving customers in the UK, Japan, Australia and Recent Zealand. Our platforms process continuously, and the businesses on them depend on transactional databases that stay fast as volumes grow, and on overnight data warehouse loads landing on time. The estate is Microsoft SQL Server throughout, across a range of hosting models: Microsoft AVS, Azure elastic pool and managed instance, and AWS.

The team is three DBAs, one in the UK and two in Pune, working a rostered pattern that extends live database coverage across the UK, Japan and ANZ business days. A team of that size against an estate of that reach means genuine ownership — the work is visible, and the people doing it shape the technical direction.

The appointment is senior. The role contributes to the maintenance and health standard for the estate and delivers it across platforms and hosting models, holds database escalation for live payments systems, and brings depth of experience to the team. For part of every shift it operates independently. It is a hands-on operate-and-improve position, technical throughout, without people-management responsibility.

What You'll Do

Production database administration

- Administering the SQL Server estate across the four in-scope platforms and their hosting models.
- Running backup and restore against defined recovery objectives, including regular restore testing rather than assumed recoverability.
- Operating availability and replication configurations, and monitoring their health daily.
- Managing database security to a least-privilege model: access provisioning and review, permissions, auditing on production systems.

Proactive maintenance and health





- Running and extending scheduled maintenance across the estate — index and statistics upkeep, integrity checks, health baselines — automated and measured rather than run by hand.
- Building the baseline picture of what normal looks like for each platform, so degradation is visible before it becomes an incident.
- Maintaining monitoring and alerting coverage, and tuning alert thresholds so what fires is worth acting on.
- Tracking database growth and capacity, and raising where headroom is running out ahead of it biting.

Performance

- Investigating and resolving performance problems: execution plan analysis, indexing strategy, statistics, blocking and deadlocks, wait statistics.
- Tuning problem queries, and taking the ones needing a code change back to the development teams with the evidence.
- Supporting the overnight data warehouse loads the reporting estate depends on, including diagnosis when a load runs long or fails.

Incident response, escalation and handover

- Acting as database escalation for production incidents raised by the 24/7 application support team.
- Owning incidents through to root cause and closing them out with a fix, rather than restoring service and moving on.
- Running the daily handover with the other Pune resource, so work in progress, open incidents and overnight events carry across the shift boundary without loss.

Standards, documentation and automation

- Writing and maintaining runbooks, to the standard where another team member can follow them unaided during cover.
- Automating recurring work with T-SQL and PowerShell so it runs to schedule and reports on itself.
- Using AI tooling in daily work for diagnostics, scripting and documentation, with output held to the same standard as anything written by hand.

📌 Senior Database Administrator (Pune)
🏢 Xplor
📍 Pune