Band 8a Lead SQL DBA

Job summary

This role is for a Lead SQL DBA, working within the SQL DBA team, collaboratively with Management, Application Development, Integration and Technical Services teams who successfully manage a large data environment.

Supporting the Principal DBA, you will be in a small team whom are the resident subject matter experts for all things SQL, taking responsibility for day to day effective DBA task delegation and management of junior members in the team, ensuring best practices are being followed.

There would be plenty of opportunities for team working and/or autonomy for the projects you would be responsible for delivering.

As a growing hospital with a mandate to deliver gold standard patient care (UHB was a nationally recognised centre of excellence by Health Secretary back in 2016), we have a rolling upgrade programme in place for our SQL environments so there will be lots of opportunities to investigate use of the latest technologies and how we can ingratiate viable new technology into our solutions, we are also planning an Azure Cloud presence.

Our SQL environments range from SQL 2005, 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2017 and 2019, so there is ample opportunity to work with the latest technologies and analyse how systems performance and resiliency improves as solutions are migrated to more powerful hardware (we use SSDs for our servers).

You will be working for a data driven organisation at a senior level, helping to support a large and busy production SQL estate.

Main duties, tasks & skills required

You will be wanted to bring your fresh ideas and experience to the team, working with DBA's, SQL developers, Application developers and third party vendors. As well as being a production SQL DBA, the role will also require you to lead on projects which involve data migration, upgrades, performance tuning, code deployments (DEV, UAT and PROD).

Key skills required:

At least 5+ years experience as production level SQL DBA managing multi instance SQL environment
Experience of working with technical SMEs and IT Project Managers to provide SQL DBA services for engagements
Day to day, task delegation and management of junior DBAs in the team
Planning and coordinating an effective 24-7 on-call rota
Very effective verbal and written communication skills with the ability to adapt based on audience
Experience of working effectively with cross functional technical IT teams
Experience of creating DBA process documentation to support a developing DBA wiki
SQL Server 2008/2012/2017/2019 (Instance installation, configuration and ongoing management, including decommissioning of legacy environments)
High Availability and Clustering management - Always-On, Log Shipping and Replication
Performance Tuning - (deep diving T-SQL, SQL profiler, Extended Events, indexes tuning, statistics, DMVs)
Active Directory, IIS & Windows Server 2003/2008/2012 understanding
Strong T-SQL coding experience
Powershell scripting knowledge
Access Security Profiling

About us

We are recognised as one of the leading NHS Foundation Trusts in the UK. Our vision is to Build Healthier Lives, and we recognise that we need incredible staff to do this.

Our commitment to our staff is to create the best place for them to work, and we are dedicated to:

• Investing in the health and wellbeing of our staff, including a commitment of offering flexible working where we can;
• Offering our staff a wide variety of training and development opportunities, to support their personal and career development objectives.

COVID-19 vaccination remains the best way to protect yourself, your family, your colleagues and of course our patients from the virus when working in our healthcare settings. We do encourage our staff to get vaccinated. We will be checking the vaccination status of all new starters so that we can manage individual and environmental risks, and so that we can support those who may be undecided about vaccination. If you are unvaccinated there is helpful advice and information at https://birminghamandsolihullcovidvaccine.nhs.uk where you can also find out more about how to access vaccination.

Job description

Please note, for more information on the Band 8a Lead SQL DBA role please see the attached job description 

Person specification

Qualifications

Essential

IT based. In-depth expert knowledge acquired through extensive relevant experience as a production DBA working with a wide and busy data estate. 

Desirable

SQL certified production DBA or other related SQL accreditations, such as MCITP. Plus degree or equivalent, preferably

Experience

Essential

Substantial experience, in database design, TSQL, SQL instance installation, configuration, performance tuning and support environments that involves complex database systems and server configurations

Significant experience in working as a production DBA in a busy, mission-critical environment where system up-time and availability is paramount with a vast SQL Server data estate

Demonstrable and significant experience in the use of TSQL SSIS, SSRS and Powershell

Demonstrable experience of working in a response-critical environment where system up-time and availability is paramount

Strong understanding and experience of implementing and maintaining backup solutions and respective monitoring for HADR

High Availability and Clustering management - Always-On, Log Shipping and Replication

ETL (including but not limited to bcp in/out, data cleansing and data archiving)

Experience of working with cross functional technical SMEs (application and integration developers) to provide SQL best practice

Experience of delegating and managing a team of junior DBAs

Desirable

Deployment management ensuring conformance of best practice in a development cycle that follows development, QA and production in a DevOps pattern

Demonstrable and significant experience of T-SQL coding for database design to 3NF

Extensive experience of delivering SQL instance to instance migrations with appropriate planning

Additional Criteria

Essential

Monitoring daily and transactional SQL backups
Deployment management ensuring conformance of best practice in a development cycle that follows development, QA and production in a DevOps pattern
SSRS / SSIS development and debugging experience
ETL (including bcp in/out, data cleansing and data archiving)

Being a hospital, the role does necessitate an on-call element, this is normally on a rotating basis shared amongst the DBA's

Disclosure and Barring Service Check

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.

Certificate of Sponsorship

Applications from job seekers who require current Skilled worker sponsorship to work in the UK are welcome and will be considered alongside all other applications. For further information visit the UK Visas and Immigration website.

From 6 April 2017, skilled worker applicants, applying for entry clearance into the UK, have had to present a criminal record certificate from each country they have resided continuously or cumulatively for 12 months or more in the past 10 years. Adult dependants (over 18 years old) are also subject to this requirement. Guidance can be found here Criminal records checks for overseas applicants.

For help with your application, contact: 

Mandeep Bains 

Mandeep.bains@uhb.nhs.uk