Senior Lead Associate - Database

Davies · Viman Nagar, Maharashtra · hybrid The Senior Lead Associate - Database serves as the principal technical authority responsible for the strategic evolution, optimisation, governance, and operational maturity of the organisation's database platforms across on-premises and cloud environments. Reporting to the Hosting Service Owner, the role drives platform resilience, performance optimisation, security enhancement, recoverability assurance, and technology lifecycle management to ensure database services remain robust, scalable, and aligned with business and technology priorities. The role provides technical leadership across the database estate, leading complex engineering initiatives, platform modernisation programmes, and risk reduction activities that improve database reliability, operational effectiveness, and long-term sustainability. Through proactive assessment of platform health, technical debt, security posture, capacity demands, and service performance trends, the Senior Lead Associate - Database develops and delivers strategic improvement roadmaps that strengthen overall service maturity. Working closely with Architecture, Application Development, Hosting, Cloud, Cyber Security, Risk, and Service Management teams, the role translates business, operational, and security requirements into scalable database standards, engineering patterns, governance controls, and target-state platform designs. The position is accountable for establishing engineering best practices, defining operational standards, and ensuring database technologies are deployed, maintained, and evolved in accordance with enterprise architecture and governance principles. The Senior Lead Associate - Database acts as the senior technical advisor and escalation authority for complex platform challenges, providing expert guidance on database architecture, performance engineering, high availability, disaster recovery, automation, and security controls. The role mentors engineering teams, strengthens technical capability across the function, and ensures service improvements are measurable, governed, and successfully adopted into operational practice. Success in the role is measured through improvements in database service reliability, performance, security, automation adoption, operational maturity, audit readiness, technical debt reduction, and infrastructure modernisation rather than through the execution of routine administrative or operational support activities. Key Responsibilities Database Engineering, Architecture & Platform Governance Serve as the principal technical authority for enterprise database platforms, providing strategic leadership and expert guidance on complex database technologies, resilience architectures, recoverability frameworks, and performance optimisation initiatives across hybrid environments. Establish and govern database engineering standards, reference architectures, configuration baselines, security controls, lifecycle strategies, operational acceptance criteria, and supportability requirements that drive consistency, scalability, and service maturity. Lead database transformation and modernisation programmes, including platform upgrades, cloud adoption initiatives, consolidation activities, migrations, lifecycle refresh programmes, and technology retirement strategies, ensuring successful implementation and operational readiness. Design, optimise, and continuously improve high-availability, disaster recovery, replication, clustering, and data protection capabilities to strengthen service resilience and align with business continuity objectives. Performance, Reliability & Technical Debt Reduction Drive advanced database performance engineering initiatives through analysis of workload characteristics, execution plans, indexing strategies, resource utilisation, concurrency patterns, telemetry insights, and operational trends, delivering sustainable improvements in platform efficiency and scalability. Lead the identificat