Senior Infrastructure Engineer (Database Administrator) - Office for National Statistics - SEO

Location

The ONS operates a flexible hybrid working model across the UK, with colleagues linked to one of our contractual locations working between office and remote throughout the week. The locations for this role are Newport and Titchfield (Fareham),

All colleagues are required to work from their contractually allocated site for at least 40% of their working time.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

About the job

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics.  These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Database Administrator to join our Database team working within our Corporate IT & Services Division, with strong background and skills in SQL to undertake support, change management and project activities for Business-critical SQL based services.  To ensure the production environments are supported and managed proactively, and that maintenance work is planned and scheduled around Business activity.  

Actively identifying areas for improvement for services supported. Proactive in documenting and sharing knowledge, enhancing the capability within the team and working collaboratively. 

Job description

As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer you will build, manage, and support the infrastructure services that underpin all internal user services and services for an organisation.

Defining, building, bringing into service, operating, supporting, performance monitoring, continually improving and decommissioning Infrastructure services (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS), products and platforms to serve a variety of user needs.  

For the services, products and platforms supported:  

• Managing incidents, requests, changes and problems.  
• Managing the configuration, availability, security, capacity, performance, and cost. 
• Engage in continuous improvement activities. 
• Managing all aspects of the lifecycle of assets from acquisition through to disposal to include CMDB updates.  

Maximising the use of tools and technologies to deliver operational excellence.  Actively participate in the Infrastructure Engineering Community of Practice, identifying good practices operations can adopt and sharing experiences. Sharing knowledge of tools and techniques and collaborating to improve the capability of the team. Ensuring the team has a situational awareness of what each other is working on and how this relates to organisational strategies and user needs. Maintains an understanding of Agile methodology and applies an agile mindset to all aspects of their work, utilising an iterative method and flexible approach to enable rapid delivery.  

Responsibilities 

• Proactively manage and monitor production database instances, ensuring that the databases relied on by Business-critical systems are available for use and performant. 
• Manage the databases used by pre-production and test systems, ensuring that these reflect live, and that any necessary work to support project delivery is undertaken in a timely manner.
• Ensure that assigned Service Requests are fulfilled in a timely manner and that customers are sent notification when work is complete.
• Manage database patching and upgrade cycles, ensuring that work to deploy these is planned around business activity, and interruption to service is minimised. 
• Own and resolve assigned Incidents, ensuring that effective communication with customers is maintained throughout and business impact is understood and minimised.   
• Take a lead technical role in the management of major incidents ensuring that the incident is managed and communicated effectively. 
• Ensure that assigned Service Requests are fulfilled in a timely manner and that customers are  updated and notified when work is complete.
• Document processes, procedures and review documents written by other team members, providing feedback where required. 
• Participate in project and design workshops and meetings providing SQL technical knowledge to add value to the project. 
• Follow agreed change management processes in order to implement new or changed services, ensuring that changes are communicated in advance of their planned implementation date. 

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Information Security (Working) - Use information security practices and available security controls to contribute to protecting solutions and services.
• Ownership and Initiative (Working) - Own a problem until a new owner has been found or the problem has been mitigated or resolved.
• Troubleshooting and problem resolution  (Practitioner) - Break a problem down into its component parts to identify and diagnose root causes. Troubleshoot and identify problems across different technology capabilities. 
• Technical Understanding (Practitioner) - Show a thorough understanding of the technical concepts required for the role, and can explain how these fit into the wider technical landscape.
• Service focus (Practitioner) -  Take inputs from various sources and use these to guide the design, development, delivery and operation of a service.  You always look to continually improve and get the best out of services you support.