Senior Oracle Database Administrator

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