Senior Database Administrator

Company Description

Take a seat on the Xplor rocketship and join us as a Database Administrator to help people succeed across the world.

We’re a global team of builders, listeners and problem-solvers who are relentlessly focused on making life simple, so our customers can get back to growing their business, engaging consumers and doing what they love.

Job Description

The Opportunity

Embedded Payments runs a group of payments platforms serving customers in the UK, Japan, Australia and New 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.

Qualifications

 

What You'll Bring

Essential

• Extensive production experience administering Microsoft SQL Server in business-critical environments, at a level where a production estate has been held as an owner rather than worked on under supervision.
• Backup, restore and recovery against defined recovery objectives, including a record of tested restores rather than only configured backups.
• Deep performance troubleshooting: execution plans, indexing strategy, statistics, blocking, deadlocks, wait statistics, and knowing which of those a given symptom points to.
• High availability in production — Always On availability groups, clustering, log shipping or replication — configured and operated, not merely inherited.
• Maintenance at estate scale: index and statistics upkeep and integrity checking, automated across many instances rather than server by server.
• Strong T-SQL, and scripting for automation in PowerShell or equivalent.
• SQL Server across more than one hosting model — Azure, AWS, or virtualised on-premises — and an understanding of what changes between them.
• Ownership of production incidents under time pressure, with the discipline to follow through to root cause and to say what happened afterwards.
• Database security to a least-privilege model: access design and review, permissions, auditing on production systems.
• Clear written and spoken English, and the written communication distributed shift work depends on: handovers, incident notes, runbooks.
• Willingness to work the rostered shift pattern, the four-weekly rotation and the on-call commitment described above.

Desirable

• Payments, fintech or another regulated, high-volume transactional environment.
• Exposure to, or previous working experience in, a PCI-DSS environment.
• SSIS or comparable ETL, and experience troubleshooting data warehouse load failures.
• Database monitoring tooling such as Redgate SQL Monitor, or a comparable estate-wide product.
• Prior experience of shift-based or follow-the-sun operational support.
• Migration and upgrade work — cross-version, or on-premises to cloud.
• Experience improving database practice in teams that do not report to you.

Core Competencies

Production Discipline

Treats production with appropriate care — changes are planned, tested and reversible, and the risky ones are raised before they are made.

Diagnostic Depth

Works a problem to its cause rather than stopping at the symptom that restored service.

Preventive Mindset

Sees unrun maintenance and missing baselines as work to be done, not background noise.

Escalation Judgement

Knows what warrants a call-out, what waits for the next shift, and who to pull in.

Independent Operation

Works effectively with no one else from the team online for part of every shift.

AI Fluency

Uses AI tooling routinely for diagnostics, scripting and documentation.

Additional Information

Shift, On-Call and Working Pattern

This is a shift-based role. The core pattern is set out below so it can be assessed before applying.

• Shifts — two nine-hour Pune shifts, Early 07:00–16:00 IST and Late 14:00–23:00 IST.
• Rotation — the two shifts rotate on a four-weekly cycle.
• On-call — the role takes part in an on-call rotation that rotates with the shift, including a share of weekend cover and a monthly Sunday patching window.
• Working arrangements — the Early shift is standard hybrid, a mixture of in-office and remote working; the Late shift is worked remotely.

We kindly ask you to apply through our careers portal or external job boards (LinkedIn, Naukri, Indeed, etc) only. Please don't send your application via email. They will not be forwarded. 

More about us 

More than 130,000 businesses in 72+ countries rely on Xplor to run their day and get paid, processing over $47 billion in payments annually. Our connected ecosystem helps operators spend less time managing complexity and more time delivering the experiences that matter most. 

Xplor is backed by world-class investors Advent International, Battery Ventures, and Silver Lake. 

Good to know

To be considered for employment, you must be legally authorised to work in the location (country) you're applying for. Xplor does not sponsor visas, either at the time of hire or at any later time. 

To learn more about us and our products, please visit xplor.com/careers/. 

We also invite you to check out our Candidate FAQs for more information about our recruitment process xplor.com/recruitment-faqs/.

EEO and Artificial Intelligence

We believe in transparent hiring. We use an applicant tracking system that includes artificial intelligence enabled features to assist with the screening and assessment of job applications, such as candidate scoring or ranking. These tools support our recruitment process, but all hiring decisions are made by our recruitment team following human review. We do not rely on artificial intelligence to make final hiring decisions. Find our Candidate AI Usage guidelines here.

Xplor is committed to providing equal opportunities in employment and creating an inclusive work environment. We provide equal opportunities to all our employees and to all eligible applicants for employment in our company. We do not unfairly discriminate on any ground, including race, religion, color, ancestry, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, age, nationality, ethnic origin, disability or any other category protected by applicable law.

We make it a priority to respond to every applicant.

• Role type: Individual Contributor
• Department: Engineering Payments
• Division: Global Technology