Senior SQL Database Administrator
Work in an organisation that supports its staff and focuses on staff experience as much as it does the experience of its patients? You can live and breathe in an area that has the cleanest air, cost effective living, great nightlife, some of the best schools with a wealth of history available on your doorstep.
Sound too good to be true? Well it isn’t, this is what you get when you work for Northumbria Healthcare and, this is…the Northumbria Way!
What the Northumbria Way means for you:
- Extensive staff health and well-being programme including access to our specialist Wellbeing Hub
- Support and connection through a variety of Staff Network groups
- A range of flexible working opportunities
- Generous annual leave and pension scheme
- Access to lease car and home electronics scheme (qualifying criteria applies)
- Opportunities to improve your professional development through our vast training programmes
- On-site nursery places via salary sacrifice
- Access to savings scheme via salary sacrifice with Northumberland Community Bank
Our teams deliver care from hospitals, a range of community venues and people’s homes. Our hospitals include a specialist emergency care hospital (the first of its kind in England), three general hospitals and community hospitals. In the community we deliver a wide range of community and public health services.
We lead in innovation and quality, having opened the Northumbria Healthcare Manufacturing and Innovation Hub during the Covid-19 pandemic and have recently launched our Community Promise – a pledge to make a real impact not just in healthcare but on the wider factors that affect people’s lives, such as education, employment and the economy.
If Northumbria Healthcare sounds like somewhere you could belong we would love to hear from you. Visit our website to catch up on our latest news.
Whilst Northumbria Healthcare are a highly innovative organisation, the use of Third Party Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a risk to the integrity of our Recruitment & Selection processes. If you use AI, and it poses a risk to the integrity your individual recruitment process, we may withdraw your application at any stage of the process.
Job overview
The Trust are recruiting an expert in SQL, to administrator, monitor, maintain, and assist development of the trusts in use SQL databases/instances, and help realise the deliverables and ambitions of the trusts digital strategy.
The Trust has several main supplier applications where SQL database instances are in use, this senior role will help inform technical architectural decisions around setup, high availability, performance and suitability. The position is to lead on SQL setups, both in the cloud and on-premise, the creation and implementation and best practices of maintenance plans, backups, H/A, and performance of the trusts SQL databases.
This role will join a Cloud Infrastructure team within Digital and Data Services, with the team responsible for all aspects of the trusts Cloud tenant and on site server equipment.
This role will be based in the recently re-furbished Seaton Delaval offices, and will benefit from part at home, and part in the office working pattern, to ensure priorities, objectives and team culture are achieved and maintained.
Please note we reserve the right to close this vacancy prior to the closing date once the required number of suitable applications have been received.
Main duties of the job- Reporting to the Lead Technical Architect. You will have a trust wide level responsibility for the installation, implementation, maintenance, availability and development of SQL server instances.
- Responsible for both cloud SQL installations and on premise installations.
- Assess and make suggestions of improvement across all SQL instances.
- To be a key stakeholder and senior lead advisor in all SQL implementations, from either internal development or supplier 3rd party, installations.
- To role model compassionate and inclusive leadership in order to shape the creation of a collective leadership culture within the trust. This means demonstrating a consistent leadership style which (a) engages, enable and empowers others (b) uses coaching to promote ownership of learning and quality improvement and (c) facilitates team working and collaboration within teams / departments and across organisational boundaries.
Working for our organisation
We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, in addition to our state-of-the-art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, the first of its kind in England.We also care for people in their homes and provide services from facilities in local communities such as health centres. We give people greater choice and control over their care to help them to live independently at home and avoid hospital admission where appropriate.
High quality patient care is at the heart of everything we do and we strive to ensure every single patient and service user has an exceptional experience with us. We have one of the most extensive patient experience programmes of any trust in England.
Detailed job description and main responsibilities- Use high levels of expertise to research and plan the required technical SQL database solutions, in line with the trust's digital strategy, and implement to published and Trust guided best practices in your field of expertise.
- Design, document, implement and peer-approve the architecture setup for the trust's SQL infrastructure, both cloud native, cloud hosted and on-premises.
- Expert familiarity with on-premise and cloud-based SQL environments, such as Azure SQL, AWS RDS for SQL Server, and the Microsoft back office SQL current and legacy versions.
- Experience with high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions such as Always On Availability Groups, Clustering, Replication, Log Shipping, and Backup/Restore strategies for SQL and have awareness of the wider technical requirements and impacts.
- Responsibility for the effective management, data integrity and performance of the organisations reporting and SQL Server environments.
- Trust wide responsibility for Installing, configuration, and management of SQL Server databases in hosted, cloud and on-premise environments.
- Working closely across other teams throughout the trust to ensure any project work and SQL infrastructure changes are in the interest of all parties. Also that they are in accordance with IG, Clinical safety and security procedures. To be active in the CAB board, relating to SQL technical changes.
- Oversee and carry out reporting and data related requests as part of the BAU and individual project streams.
- Trust wide responsibility for defining the overall SQL structure and current systems platform architecture directly linked to the use of Microsoft SQL.
- Implement and maintain robust security measures to protect sensitive healthcare data in compliance with global data protection regulations (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR).
- Uses their up-to-date knowledge of IT infrastructure to identify opportunities to use emerging technology to increase efficiency, reliability and flexibility across the entire technical estate.
- Collaborate with application developers to design database schemas, stored procedures, and functions. Provide support for database-related application development.
- To work with and lead supplier engagements where liaison and technical solution is required, along with technical supplier management and senior level escalation management.
- Work closely with various Digital teams, data analytics, and business intelligence teams to support data-related initiatives and troubleshoot issues.
- Proactive resource management and utilisation forecasting.
- Work closely with development teams to review and optimize SQL code, ensuring efficient data retrieval and minimizing performance issues. Provide guidance and best practices on writing optimised SQL queries and database interactions.
- The ability to investigate issues with other relational database platforms when required.
- Set up and manage monitoring systems to proactively identify and address issues. Perform and or train staff to perform regular maintenance tasks, including updates and patch management when required.
- Maintain comprehensive documentation of database configurations, processes, and procedures. Ensure documentation is up-to-date and accessible.
- To ensure high availability, security and usability of the SQL infrastructure in place is transparent to users and ensure Service Level Agreements can be maintained.
- Part of the CITI 24/7 365 best endeavours callout rota for emergencies that relate to digital system downtime.
- A member of the digital services call out rota within the skills discipline.
- To be an active member of the license compliance work, pertaining to the SQL environment
Person specification
Qualifications / Professional Registration
Essential criteria- Educated to degree level or equivalent experience plus additional in depth specialist knowledge and expertise in IM&T, project management procedures and techniques.
- Certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate or Microsoft Certified: Data Analyst Associate
- Hands-on experience with API-based integrations and middleware
Experience and knowledge
Essential criteria- Proven experience with SQL Availability Clustering
- Proven experience as a SQL DBA, with a strong track record of managing mission-critical databases.
- Experience in a healthcare or telehealth organization
- Proven experience in working within regulatory frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, or HITECH.
- Knowledge of or experience in coaching and mentoring practices and tools.
- Knowledge of or experience in Quality improvement tools, techniques and methods.
Applicants who are members of the Armed Forces, and those who have a disability that requires support in the work place (two ticks pledge) and who meet the essential criteria will be interviewed under the Trust's interview guarantee scheme.
We recognise the positive value of diversity and inclusion and are committed to a workforce that is diverse, equal and inclusive. We welcome and encourage job applications from people of all backgrounds. We particularly welcome applications from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates as BAME people are currently under-represented in our workforce as well as other under-represented groups such as LGBT+ and disabled candidates.We are proud to be a Disability Confident Employer, a Stonewall Diversity Champion, we have a Gold award from the Defense Recognition Scheme, and we are delighted to support Apprenticeships, Age Posi+ive and are a mindful employer.
If you require any reasonable adjustments to attend interview please make the recruitment team aware as soon as possible by calling our HR Recruitment Team on 0191 203 1415 option 2.
Applicants who meet the Fit and Proper Person Requirements (FPPR) will require additional pre-employment checks in line with CQC and NHS England statutory guidance.
Make sure to read the ‘applicant guidance notes’ before submitting your application and make sure you know everything there is to know before joining our fantastic trust!
Please note that it is a requirement of this Trust that all successful applicants pay for their own DBS certification if a DBS check is required for the post. The method of payment is a salary deduction from your first monthly pay.