Senior Database Administrator

Agency : Havas Creative Job Description : The Senior Database Administrator is a hands-on senior technical role responsible for the reliability, availability, security, performance, recoverability, and lifecycle management of enterprise Microsoft SQL Server environments. The position owns operational and strategic administration of SQL Server 2019 and later across development, QA, staging, reporting, and production workloads. The successful candidate brings a minimum of seven years of database administration experience, deep SQL Server troubleshooting expertise, strong automation practices, and the ability to lead complex production support, upgrade, security, and recovery initiatives. Administer, monitor, tune, patch, upgrade, and troubleshoot SQL Server 2019 and newer environments. Own database integrity, availability, backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures, including recurring recovery testing. Implement and support high-availability solutions such as Always On Availability Groups and appropriate failover architectures. Analyze execution plans, indexes, statistics, waits, memory, tempdb, storage, blocking, deadlocks, and concurrency issues. Create database maintenance standards for consistency checks, backups, index/statistics care, jobs, retention, and capacity. Administer security using least privilege, role-based access, encryption, auditing, service-account governance, and access reviews. Partner with developers and data engineers on schema design, stored procedures, query performance, releases, and rollback planning. Automate operational tasks using T-SQL, PowerShell, SQLCMD, SQL Agent, source control, and approved monitoring platforms. Lead database incident response, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and stakeholder communication. Provide technical leadership for SQL Server migrations, consolidations, upgrades, Azure SQL adoption, and hybrid modernization. Support Microsoft BI and integration workloads where SQL Server is a source or platform, including SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, and Power BI connectivity. Maintain architecture diagrams, configuration baselines, runbooks, escalation procedures, and support documentation. Qualification: • Minimum 7 years of professional database administration experience, including senior ownership of enterprise Microsoft SQL Server environments. • Advanced production experience with SQL Server 2019 or later, including installation, configuration, patching, security, performance, backup/recovery, and troubleshooting. • Advanced T-SQL and deep understanding of SQL Server internals, indexing, query optimization, transactions, locking, and concurrency. • Hands-on experience with HA/DR technologies and validated recovery procedures. • Strong Windows Server, authentication, storage, networking, service account, certificate, and permission fundamentals. • Experience automating DBA work with PowerShell, T-SQL, and source-controlled scripts. • Experience leading complex incidents and communicating clearly under production pressure. Measures of Success · Improved database availability, recovery confidence, and adherence to maintenance and patching standards. · Reduced recurring incidents and improved response time through monitoring, automation, and documented runbooks. · Measurable improvements in critical query and workload performance. · Secure, auditable, least-privilege database access with clear ownership and review practices. · Successful upgrades and migrations with validated rollback and recovery plans. General Competencies · Hands-on ownership, sound judgment, attention to detail, and disciplined follow-through. · Clear written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders. · Ability to mentor team members, lead design or incident reviews, and document repeatable standards. · Commitment to security, data privacy, responsible technology use, and continuous learning. Contract Type : Permanent Here at Havas across the group we pride ourselves on being committed to offering equal opportunities to all potential employees and have zero tolerance for discrimination. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome applicants irrespective of age, sex, race, ethnicity, disability and other factors that have no bearing on an individual’s ability to perform their job.