Lead Database Developer

Lead Database Developer

Salary 55,000 to 60,000 depending on experience

Permanent

Folkestone Hybrid

As our new Lead Database Developer, you will be the senior technical specialist responsible for improving the performance, scalability, and engineering quality of Sagas Customer Hub data solution.

The Customer Hub is a critical strategic platform sitting at the very heart of Saga with over 10 million customer records and is constantly growing. As we continue to serve more customers and embark on new and exciting partnerships as part of our wider growth strategy, your role in sustaining this high-performing database is crucial to our success.

This database supports customer data management, customer matching, partner integrations, data processing, and customer data distribution across Saga's technology landscape. This role helps ensure that data solutions are designed and optimised to support efficient, secure, and scalable customer data capabilities.

Youll act as a technical authority for Customer Hub data engineering and performance optimisation, driving best practice, supporting delivery teams, and ensuring the platform continues to support strategic business initiatives, partner integrations, and customer data quality objectives.

We work in a hybrid way at Saga, both at home and in the office. This role requires you to be working from our Folkestone office at least once a week, allowing us to collaborate and share success as a business.

As our Lead Database Developer, you will provide expert guidance on database technologies, lead complex development initiatives, and ensure the reliability, performance, and continual improvement of our data platforms.

Other accountabilities will include:

Investigating performance bottlenecks across customer data processing and integration flows.

Improving SQL code, stored procedures, and data-processing logic to support efficient delivery.

Leading complex performance analysis activities and translate findings into practical engineering improvements.

Supporting delivery teams in shaping efficient data models, data flows, and integration patterns.

Helping ensure customer data services are engineered to meet performance, security, and quality expectations.

Providing technical input into solution decisions that affect data quality, partner integrations, and strategic delivery.

Identifying opportunities to improve the efficiency of customer data processing and storage usage.

Supporting data lifecycle and retention requirements through well-designed engineering approaches.

Assessing data growth trends and recommend design improvements to support future scalability.

Developing and improving automated deployment and validation approaches for data changes.

Supporting integration of data change delivery within CI/CD pipelines

Implementing automation to improve delivery quality, repeatability, and engineering productivity.

Supporting release planning by assessing the performance and data impact of proposed changes.

Helping define validation criteria for data changes, integration flows, and performance-sensitive releases.

Working with delivery teams to confirm that changes are engineered to meet performance and quality expectations.

Contributing to post-release learning by identifying opportunities to improve future delivery outcomes.

Providing technical guidance on data design, SQL development, performance, and scalability.

Supporting code reviews and engineering improvements for data-related changes.

The successful candidate will bring a strong track record of improving data solution performance, increasing engineering quality, automating delivery processes, and ensuring customer data capabilities continue to support partner integrations, strategic initiatives, and business growth objectives.

This includes experience performing activities such as API performance analysis, query optimisation, code tuning, delivery automation, release validation, data model improvement, and proactive scalability planning.

You will need to demonstrate the following skills;

Expert knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server development, data engineering, and performance optimisation.

Extensive experience analysing query behaviour, execution plans, indexing approaches, and performance diagnostics.

Strong experience designing and improving high-volume transactional data solutions and business-critical applications.

Advanced Transact-SQL development and opti