Role/Job title: Oracle DBA
Work Location: Coventry
Role type: Contract InsideIR35
Mode of working: Hybrid 2 Days/week
Duration of assignment: 6 months
The Role:
We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Database Administrator (L3) to take ownership of mission-critical database platforms across a complex enterprise environment.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role, where you will act as the highest internal escalation point, lead major incident recovery, and shape the reliability, resilience, and performance of our database services.
Your responsibilities:
- Own and lead resolution of critical (P1/P2) database incidents
- Perform deep root cause analysis with preventative actions
- Act as the final escalation point before vendor engagement
- Design and approve HA/DR and backup architectures
- Govern high-risk changes, releases, and migrations
- Reduce repeat incidents and technical debt
- Improve monitoring, alerting, and observability
- Lead vendor escalations and support cases
- Mentor L1/L2 DBAs and uplift team capability
- Define and enforce standards and operational playbooks
- Incident Authority
- Authority to take real-time technical decisions during major incidents including failover, switchover, and rollback to restore services safely.
Your Profile
Technical Skills & Experience
Oracle Expertise (Core Requirement)
- Deep hands-on experience with Oracle 12c, 19c, 23ai
- Expert-level knowledge of:
- Oracle RAC (design, administration, troubleshooting)
- Data Guard (physical standby, switchover/failover, broker)
- ASM (disk groups, performance tuning, rebalancing, failure handling)
- RMAN (backup optimisation, recovery scenarios, catalog management)
Advanced Oracle Capabilities
- Strong expertise in:
- Oracle performance tuning (AWR, ASH, ADDM, SQL Tuning Advisor)
- SQL and PL/SQL troubleshooting and optimization
- Execution plan analysis and query refactoring
- Hands-on experience with:
- Partitioning strategies and large database (VLDB) management
- Oracle Multitenant Architecture (CDB/PDB administration)
- Patching & upgrades (PSU/RU, out-of-place patching, datapatch)
- Database security (TDE, auditing, roles/privileges, encryption)
- Space and storage management, capacity planning
- Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM / Cloud Control) for monitoring and diagnostics
- High Availability, DR & Resilience
- Design and implementation of robust:
- HA/DR architectures (RAC + Data Guard combinations)
- Backup and recovery strategies aligned to RPO/RTO
- Failover testing and DR drills
- Platforms & Infrastructure
- Strong proficiency in:
- Linux ,Solaris and AIX
- Experience with:
- Cloud-based database deployments ( AWS/IBM cloud )
- Cross-Platform Database Skills
- Excellent working knowledge of:
- SQL Server
- DB2
- PostgreSQL
- What We’re Looking For
- Strong technical skills
- Strong incident leadership and decision-making under pressure
- Clear communicator across technical and business stakeholders
- High degree of ownership, accountability, and resilience
- Passion for mentoring and knowledge sharing
- Focus on continuous improvement and automation