Podfather | Senior Database Administrator
About this role
Home Vacancies Senior Database Administrator Senior Database Administrator Edinburgh office, hybrid Full time 60,000 to £70,000 pa Role Overview Apply now Join our Team Role Overview As a Senior Database Administrator, you’ll be the steward of the data layer that powers Podfather. Working closely with our Software Engineers, DevOps Engineers, and CTO, you will keep our databases reliable, performant, and well-designed as the business grows. If you love solving real-world problems, collaborating with a passionate team, and making a tangible impact every day, we want to hear from you. Who is Podfather? With our team of around 60 people working remotely or at our Edinburgh head office, we believe that we can offer you something special here at Podfather. Our whole ethos is about creating a unique and rewarding experience for both our customers and our employees. When you work here, you will get involved with challenging projects within a fun and friendly environment. We are a medium-sized company, which means you get to be part of multiple projects, wear different hats, and truly see the difference your work makes. We develop and deliver industry-leading route optimisation and electronic proof of delivery (ePOD) technology to the logistics, construction, and field service sectors. We have some huge clients, and some tiny ones, and because we are growing fast, now is a great time to join our team. At Podfather, we're guided by our core values: reliable, innovative, determined, collaborative, candid, and caring . You'll see these in action every day in how we work together, solve problems, and support our customers. Where do you fit in? We recognise that impact in this role can be made in different ways, and that there are different ‘shapes’ of DBA. Depending on your background and interests, this role may lean more towards day-to-day operations and tuning, or more towards schema design and working alongside application developers. In this role, you will be joining our Engineering & Infrastructure team. You will focus on: Database Operations: Take ownership of the day-to-day health of our MariaDB/MySQL estate, monitoring, backups, replication, capacity, upgrades, and patching, ensuring the platform stays reliable and recoverable. Schema Design & Evolution: Design new schemas and evolve existing ones to support new product features, working with engineers to ensure changes are safe to deploy, performant at scale, and easy to maintain over time. Performance & Scaling: Identify performance hotspots, tune queries/indexes, and help the team plan for growth as we scale to hundreds of thousands of users. Driving Change & Problem Solving: Identify, understand, and resolve critical database and data-integrity issues. You'll articulate database trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike to drive high-leverage improvements. Information Security: Handle data securely throughout its lifecycle (encryption at rest/in transit), enforce the principle of least privilege, manage secure authentication, and handle patches/updates to protect the database estate. Technical Expertise We are looking for a skilled practitioner who can lead database work to successful technical outcomes by factoring in technical debt, data modelling, stability, security, and business needs. Query Optimisation: Comfortable reading and optimising SQL using execution plans, indexes, and configuration tuning. Resilience & Observability: Responsible for backup strategies, replication, and disaster recovery procedures (including regular verification). You will fill database monitoring and alerting gaps to stop issues before they become incidents. Application Layer Collaboration: Work closely with engineers writing application code (primarily PHP at Podfather) to review how the application talks to the database, ensuring migrations are a routine process rather than a risky event. Incident Management: Take a leading role in debugging complex database issues, managing incidents, and collaborating with support teams to share known workarounds. Required Skills: MariaDB/MySQL experience. Schema design experience. Some experience of growing databases to scale, to hundreds of thousands of users and beyond. Some application development experience; PHP would be preferred, but any experience working with a mature codebase would be fine. Preferred Skills: AWS experience preferred, but other cloud experience would be also be helpful. PostgreSQL experience. Data warehousing experience. Experience of database scaling technologies such as sharding, pagination, replicas, caching, proxying Experience of wider database technologies such as NoSQL, Graph, time-series DBs Apply now! Ready to help us scale the data layer behind our expanding platform? If you are interested in joining the Podfather team, please email your CV and a cover letter explaining why you're a great fit for the role to jobs@podfather.com . Contact us Staff benefits Generous Holiday: 30 days holiday a year + the option to buy up to 5 extra days and additional days for each year of service (up to 10 years) Continuous Growth: A commitment to your development through an individual training budget. The Right Tools: High-spec workstation, multiple monitors, and your choice of operating system/kit. Great Office Perks: A nice working environment with complimentary drinks and snacks in our Edinburgh office, strong transport links, and free parking. Social Culture: Regular team events and social activities, including board games and online games nights. Health & Wellbeing: Comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme which includes a 24/7 confidential helpline, remote GP and physiotherapy appointments, mental health support, lifestyle coaching, and nutritionist sessions. Peace of Mind: Life Assurance and a company pension plan. Extra Perks: Bike-to-work scheme and Enhanced Life Friendly Policies. Working at Podfather Team member Lead software engineer Meet the team View all vacancies Team member Director Meet the team View all vacancies Ready to start your journey? We’d love to show you how we could help your business through improved logistics planning. Get in touch today and let’s talk about what challenges you are currently facing in your business and how we could help you to overcome them with smart, easy to use delivery management software that delivers real results.
What this role is, and what else it is called
It is a senior Database Administration role in Edinburgh, advertised as hybrid, splitting time between home and the office.
About hiring at Thepodfather
Thepodfather has 18 other live technology roles on its careers page, across Software Engineering, DevOps, Platform & SRE and Database Administration. Of those, 0% are advertised as fully remote and 100% as hybrid. Where Thepodfather states a salary, the median advertised ceiling is £35,000 across 12 roles. Elsewhere in its adverts Thepodfather asks for JavaScript and React. We have been observing Thepodfather hiring technology staff since May 2026. See all Thepodfather roles, salaries and stack.
How this role compares to the market
925 live UK roles list PHP right now, from 342 employers. The median advertised salary is £45,000; 31% are advertised as remote. Browse PHP roles.
1,459 live UK roles list AWS right now, from 503 employers. The median advertised salary is £80,000; 28% are advertised as remote. Browse AWS roles.
Edinburgh has 82 live IT vacancies across 29 employers, with a median advertised salary of £35,000. Browse Edinburgh roles.
Senior roles make up 1,633 of the live UK IT market and advertise a median of £80,000.
Market figures are today's snapshot of live UK roles on employer careers pages; see hiring trends.
Technologies mentioned
Detected on Thepodfather's careers page. ProdReady Recruitment lists this vacancy as an aggregator and is not the employer; applications go to the employer's own site. More IT jobs in Scotland.