We are looking for a highly experienced Senior Database Architect/Senior PostgreSQL DBA to join a large-scale payments modernisation programme within a leading financial services organisation.

This role will play a key part in transforming a critical payments platform, helping to migrate from Legacy Mainframe DB2 technology to a modern cloud-based PostgreSQL environment. You will provide technical leadership around database architecture, performance, migration strategy and data integrity, ensuring the platform is secure, scalable and capable of supporting high-volume transactional workloads.

Location: Hybrid - 3 days per week in the office
Contract: Initial 6 months (likely extension)
IR35: Inside IR35

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead the design and architecture of enterprise PostgreSQL databases supporting mission-critical payment platforms.
• Review, optimise and improve logical and physical data models across complex transactional systems.
• Define migration strategies from Legacy Mainframe DB2 databases to cloud-native PostgreSQL environments.
• Analyse existing schemas, stored procedures, batch processing and data flows to support phased migration.
• Ensure data integrity, auditability and reconciliation throughout migration and transformation activities.
• Drive database performance optimisation through query tuning, indexing strategies, partitioning and workload analysis.
• Design highly available database solutions covering replication, backup, disaster recovery and failover.
• Establish database standards, governance and best practices across engineering teams.
• Produce high-quality technical documentation including database designs, migration approaches, operational runbooks and architecture decisions.
• Support development teams with database design, schema evolution and release management.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Extensive experience designing and administering PostgreSQL databases within large enterprise environments, ideally AWS Aurora PostgreSQL.
• Strong knowledge of database architecture, schema design, indexing, query optimisation, partitioning, replication, backup & recovery, and high availability.
• Experience designing scalable, high-volume OLTP databases with strong logical and physical data modelling skills.
• Proven experience migrating Legacy Mainframe DB2 databases to modern PostgreSQL environments.
• Strong understanding of data mapping, reconciliation and migration strategies across complex platforms.
• Excellent performance tuning and database optimisation experience, including execution plan analysis and workload management.
• Experience with database change management tools such as Liquibase or Flyway.
• Previous experience working within highly regulated Financial Services environments, with a strong focus on security, auditability and data integrity.
• Strong stakeholder management skills, working closely with architects, engineers and business teams.

Desirable

• Payments experience (Faster Payments, CHAPS, BACS or International Payments).
• Knowledge of ISO 20022 messaging standards.
• Experience with AWS Aurora operational tooling (Performance Insights, CloudWatch, Read Replicas and Cross-AZ failover).
• Familiarity with GitLab CI/CD, Java/Spring Boot persistence, data masking and financial services governance processes.