Operations Engineer

Operations Engineer

• Location: Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England.
• Contract: Permanent, full-time
• Hours: 37.5 hours per week, Monday to Friday
• Salary: Competitive

We are recruiting an experienced Operations Engineer to join a growing technology team responsible for the reliability, performance and security of business-critical digital platforms.

This is a hands-on role covering database administration, infrastructure support, monitoring, backups, cloud services and operational improvements across both on-premises and AWS environments.

The role would suit someone with strong experience across MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Linux, Windows, VMware, monitoring tools and backup management, who enjoys keeping complex systems stable, secure and performing well.

The role

As Operations Engineer, you will help manage and improve the infrastructure, databases and operational systems that support a busy digital platform estate.

Your initial focus will be the administration, optimisation and reliability of the database environment, including MySQL, MSSQL and PostgreSQL, alongside broader operational responsibilities across Linux servers, Windows systems, VMware virtualisation, cloud backups, monitoring, networking and AWS services.

You will take ownership of operational tasks, respond to incidents, support patching and maintenance, improve monitoring coverage and help automate routine processes.

This role includes occasional out-of-hours work for critical incidents, updates and patching where required.

About you

You will be methodical, dependable and comfortable taking ownership of technical systems. You will enjoy solving problems, improving reliability and working across a broad range of infrastructure, database and cloud technologies.

You do not need to be an AWS expert, but you should have a genuine interest in learning cloud services and modern infrastructure practices.

This is a strong opportunity for an Operations Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer, Systems Administrator, Database Administrator or Platform Support Engineer who wants a varied role across databases, infrastructure, monitoring, backups, cloud and automation.

Key responsibilities

• Administer, monitor and optimise MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases
• Support database reliability, performance, backups and disaster recovery
• Maintain Linux, Windows and VMware infrastructure across on-premises and cloud environments
• Monitor systems, investigate incidents and improve alerting, dashboards and reporting
• Support patching, updates, security and operational maintenance
• Work with AWS services, with training provided where needed
• Automate routine tasks using scripting or infrastructure tools
• Maintain clear operational documentation and support change-management processes
• Work closely with engineering and product teams to improve platform reliability

Essential experience

• Hands-on database administration experience with MySQL, MSSQL and/or PostgreSQL
• Strong Linux systems administration experience
• Experience with Windows servers and VMware virtualisation
• Experience with monitoring tools, alerting and incident response
• Understanding of backups, recovery processes and disaster recovery
• Working knowledge of networking concepts, including DNS, routing and firewalls
• Comfortable troubleshooting infrastructure, database and platform issues
• Strong attention to detail and a proactive approach to reliability and improvement

Desirable experience

• Clustered database environments
• AWS services such as RDS, Aurora, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, Route 53, ALB/NLB or DMS
• Bash or Python scripting
• Terraform, CloudFormation, Puppet or other infrastructure-as-code tools
• Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, CheckMK or similar monitoring tools
• GitLab
• Microsoft Entra ID / Active Directory
• Cisco Meraki, pfSense or similar networking technologies

Technologies used

Ubuntu Linux, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Bash, Python, VMware, AWS, Terraform, CloudFormation, Puppet, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, CheckMK, GitLab, Microsoft Entra ID / Active Directory, Cisco Meraki, pfSense and Dell hardware.

If this feels like a good fit, please submit your CV.