Senior Database and ETL Engineer

Senior Database and ETL Engineer

FGH Business Centre 66-70 Vicar Ln, Bradford BD1 5AJ

Hybrid flexibility: 2 office days per week

About The Role

The Senior Database & ETL Engineer is responsible for the operational management, performance, resilience, and security of the organisation’s database platforms, primarily Microsoft SQL Server & Teradata alongside the development and support of ETL/ELT and data integration solutions.

The role ensures high availability, disaster recovery, data integrity, and optimal performance of critical systems, including replication, failover, backup, and recovery processes, and takes ownership of database-related incident response and recovery where required.

Working across database administration and engineering, the role designs, develops, supports ETL/ELT solutions, using SSIS where appropriate alongside SQL/T-SQL and other integration technologies, ensuring reliable movement and transformation of data across operational, warehousing, analytics, and reporting platforms.

The role will also support the evolution and modernisation of the data platform. Teradata experience is highly desirable, with experience of other large-scale enterprise or MPP data platforms also beneficial. Exposure to Microsoft Fabric and the wider Azure data ecosystem would be advantageous as the organisation evolves its data platform.

Please note that the role expectation is to act as part of out of hours (OOH) third line support group in case of operational failures. OOH time that can be claimed as overtime or time off in lieu.

Accountabilities

Database Administration & Support

• Administer, monitor, and maintain Microsoft SQL Server & Teradata environments across development, test, and production, ensuring consistency, stability, and appropriate operational controls
• Ensure high availability, resilience, and performance of database platforms, including management of replication, failover (e.g. Always On), and recovery processes
• Design, implement, and manage backup, restore, and disaster recovery strategies, regularly validating recovery procedures
• Proactively monitor database health, performance, and capacity, identifying and resolving incidents, bottlenecks, and risks before they impact the business
• Lead database-related incident response and recovery, providing clear ownership during major incidents and contributing to root-cause analysis
• Plan and execute database patching, upgrades, configuration changes, and maintenance activities in line with change and release governance processes
• Maintain database security, access controls, and compliance with internal standards and regulatory requirements
• Support database migration activities and platform modernisation initiatives, ensuring minimal risk and disruption to business operations
• Support other database platforms where required, including Teradata, and contribute to the evaluation of future database technologies and cloud/hybrid platform strategies

Database Performance & Optimisation

• Review and optimise database performance, including query tuning, indexing strategies, execution plan analysis, workload management, and capacity considerations
• Design, develop, and review database objects (e.g. stored procedures, views, functions) to ensure performance, scalability, maintainability, and data integrity
• Collaborate with application, data engineering, and analytics teams to promote efficient data access patterns and minimise database contention
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across database and ETL/ELT workloads, including blocking, deadlocks, long-running queries, and resource contention
• Establish and promote best practices for SQL development, database design, data modelling, and production support
• Support performance testing and capacity planning activities to ensure platforms and data workloads scale effectively

ETL/ELT, Integration & Data Engineering

• Design, develop, enhance, and support ETL/ELT and data integration solutions, with a strong focus on SQL (Teradata)/T-SQL and SSIS while working with equivalent integration technologies where appropriate
• Build and maintain reliable data pipelines and transformations, including package design, deployment, scheduling, monitoring, and error handling
• Troubleshoot and resolve issues affecting data pipelines, integrations, batch processing, and reporting workloads
• Optimise ETL/ELT performance, including scheduling, database interaction, resource utilisation, contention, and end-to-end processing times
• Use scripting and automation where appropriate to improve reliability, repeatability, and reduce manual operational effort
• Support data quality, reconciliation, and integrity across source, integration, warehouse, analytics, and reporting platforms

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as a subject-matter expert across database administration and ETL/ELT and data integration, advising on design, performance, reliability, and best practice
• Work closely with data engineering, analytics, application, and infrastructure teams to investigate incidents, resolve problems, and deliver planned improvements
• Contribute to technical documentation, knowledge sharing, and skills development across the team, reducing key-person dependencies

Governance, Security & Compliance

• Implement appropriate data security controls (roles, permissions, encryption) across database and integration solutions
• Support compliance with internal standards and external regulations (e.g. GDPR)
• Ensure auditability, traceability, and appropriate operational controls for database and ETL/ELT processes where required

Ways of Working

• Comfortable working across operational support, incident response, planned engineering, and project delivery in agile, waterfall, or hybrid models
• Able to balance reactive production support with planned ETL/ELT development, platform improvements, and modernisation activity
• Focused on continuous improvement, automation, reliability, and reducing manual operational effort
• Values knowledge sharing, documentation, collaborative problem-solving, and developing capability across both legacy and modern data platforms

About You

• Able to commute to Bradford City Centre 2 days per week
• Strong hands-on experience with Microsoft SQL Server in production environments
• Experience working with Teradata, particularly development and/or DBA activities in a production data warehouse environment.
• Proven experience administering, monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting SQL Server databases
• Strong T-SQL skills, including query development, performance tuning, and optimisation
• Hands-on ETL/ELT development experience, preferably using SSIS, including transformation logic, deployment, scheduling, monitoring, and troubleshooting
• Experience diagnosing and resolving database, data integration, performance, availability, and data-related issues
• Practical experience implementing and supporting HA/DR solutions (e.g. backup/recovery, replication, failover)
• Experience supporting business-critical data pipelines and batch processing in production environments
• Ability to work effectively across both operational DBA support and planned engineering/development activities
• Ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

ABOUT US: FGH DIGITAL

For over 100 years, Freemans has been at the forefront of home shopping, delivering quality products and exceptional service. We’ve accepted the challenge to transform our business into a modern, digital-first retailer.

With a rich heritage and an eye on the future, we are a forward-thinking, tech-driven online retail business, making fabulous fashion and stylish homewares accessible and affordable for everyone.

Based in West Yorkshire and part of the OTTO group one of the world’s largest online retail organisations, Freemans Grattan Holdings (FGH) is the home of familiar brands such as Freemans, Grattan, Kaleidoscope, and Curvissa.

What We Offer You

FLEXIBILITY

We offer a range of hybrid and flexible working options to help you achieve a healthy work life balance. Our full time head office colleagues work a minimum of 2 days per week in the office, allowing the perfect balance between collaborative in-person team work and the flexibility to work from home.

TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

Turning your job into a career is a real passion for us and our development programmes will enable you to grow in role.

We offer clear career pathways that will show you the way, outlining the skills, behaviours and knowledge needed to perform at the next step.

We invest in our colleagues, giving them all the opportunity to progress. Our inspired leadership programme is aimed at equipping our future leaders to coach, develop, manage change and maintain situational awareness.

INCLUSIVITY

As a business, we depend on a fusion of identities, characteristics, backgrounds, and cultures to fully appreciate our people and our customers. Freemans has a long-standing commitment to ensuring fairness and balance.

Our company is an inclusive organisation where everybody can make the most of their talent and abilities. Our pay, reward, and progression approach is based solely on fairness and merit.

Benefits

We firmly believe that we should reward our brilliant people with extensive benefits to help them stay healthy, relax and re-energise, have fun, manage the day-to-day and plan for the future. Here are just some of our great benefits:

• Competitive salaries and annual bonus scheme
• 37 days holiday
• Healthcare cash plan
• Competitive pension scheme
• Life assurance
• Paid paternity and maternity leave
• Incredible staff discounts
• Subsidised Canteen

Ready to apply?

If you’re excited about this opportunity and want to join FGH, click apply now to send us your application.