Principal Database Engineer (Contract)

Responsibilities

Lead the operation and optimisation of database platforms, ensuring high availability, data integrity, and sufficient capacity for business growth and peak workloads.

Identify and resolve database performance and architecture risks, including slow queries, oversized Redis keys, and inappropriate dependencies on caching systems.

Plan and execute database version upgrades and security patches, with tested rollback procedures and minimal service disruption.

Assess database software, infrastructure, and availability risks, working with cloud providers and engineering teams to implement improvements.

Establish standards for database configuration, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, and cost management.

Design and develop database management tools and automation using Go or Python.

Provide technical guidance on database selection, architecture, and production incident resolution.

Requirements

At least 8 years of hands‑on database administration or engineering experience supporting large‑scale production environments.

Experience owning database operations within an organisation's internal engineering team.

Deep expertise in MySQL and Redis, including architecture, performance tuning, replication, high availability, and recovery.

Strong working knowledge of TiDB and distributed database concepts.

Hands‑on experience with AWS services such as VPC, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, and Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey.

Proficiency in Python or Go, with experience developing database management platforms or operational automation tools.

Experience with capacity planning and maintaining database reliability during significant traffic spikes.

Ability to define availability and recovery targets and implement tested procedures to meet them.

Strong problem‑solving, collaboration, and change management skills, including clear communication during production incidents.

Nice to Have

Experience with Elasticsearch, Amazon OpenSearch Service, or Apache Doris.

Experience with geographically separate backups, disaster recovery, data classification, and data masking.

Experience supporting data security audits and compliance initiatives.

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