Job SummaryThe Senior Oracle Database Administrator is accountable for the reliable, secure and efficient operation of Oracle database platforms supporting business-critical applications. The role combines hands-on database administration with engineering, troubleshooting, lifecycle management, security controls and close collaboration across application, infrastructure, security and DevOps teams.
The successful candidate will own operational database activities from installation and configuration through monitoring, performance optimization, backup and recovery, patching, upgrades and production support. The role also contributes database expertise to ensure that database changes are tested, documented, auditable and safely promoted through environments.
Your Key Responsibilities - Responsible for decision-making, optimizing processes, resource management, and overseeing team management as needed for task execution.
- Accountable for allocating personnel, supervising team members, assigning tasks, ensuring that the team has the necessary tools and support to succeed in their roles and optimizing and evaluating their performance to meet organizational goals.
Core database administration - Install, create, configure and maintain Oracle databases on all environments
- Administer database instances, schemas, storage, tablespaces, parameters, listeners, services and connectivity in line with agreed standards.
- Plan and execute database patching, version upgrades and technical maintenance, including prerequisite checks, rollback planning, validation and evidence capture.
- Execute database and schema refreshes across environments using approved native tools and controlled procedures.
- Maintain accurate operational documentation, configuration records, runbooks and technical procedures.
Performance, availability and resilience - Monitor database health, capacity, availability and performance; identify trends and address risks before they affect service quality.
- Perform database performance tuning, investigate bottlenecks and optimize configuration, queries, indexes and resource utilization where appropriate.
- Design, operate and test backup, restore and recovery procedures using Oracle RMAN, and ensure recovery evidence is retained.
- Operate and troubleshoot high-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities, especially Oracle Data Guard; experience with RAC, ASM and Grid Infrastructure is beneficial.
- Support capacity planning, housekeeping, availability reviews and disaster-recovery exercises for critical database services.
Security, access and audit - Implement database security controls, including user and role administration, least-privilege access, authentication integration and segregation of duties.
- Administer encryption controls such as Transparent Data Encryption and file-system-level encryption, as well as encrypted database connections.
- Review vulnerability assessment findings, assess database impact and apply required remediation or patches through controlled change processes.
- Configure and maintain database auditing and reporting mechanisms, and provide traceable evidence for reviews and audits.
- Troubleshoot Oracle network configuration, listener issues, certificates, connection encryption and authentication problems.
Delivery, Operations and Collaboration -
Operational support and service management
- Provide advanced troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for database incidents, performance degradation, failed jobs, connectivity issues and application errors.
- Participate in incident, problem, change and release processes; communicate technical status, risk, impact and remediation clearly.
- Support planned maintenance and, where required by the operating model, on-call or out-of-hours activities for critical services.
- Work with application teams to translate business and technical requirements into supportable database solutions.
- Coordinate with infrastructure, cloud, network, security and identity teams to resolve cross-platform issues.
- Identify opportunities to automate repetitive administration, monitoring, configuration and deployment activities using scripting and configuration-management tools.
- Contribute to standards, reusable procedures, knowledge transfer and continuous improvement of database operations.
Expected deliverables -
Deliverable
- Operational documentation
- Change artefacts
- Health and performance outputs
- Security and compliance evidence
- Knowledge transfer
Typical content - Runbooks, configuration standards, recovery procedures and troubleshooting guides
- Implementation plan, test evidence, rollback plan, approvals and post-change validation
- Monitoring findings, capacity observations, tuning recommendations and incident analysis
- Access reviews, patch evidence, vulnerability remediation, encryption and audit records
