System Engineer - Smart Factory Team

Overview

As a result of growth and internal mobility, we have a new opportunity for a System Engineer to join our Smart Factory team, part of our growing Operations function. Reporting to the Data Systems Manager and based at our manufacturing site in Durham, UK, this is a key role for us with responsibility for supporting and managing all manufacturing databases (structured and unstructured).

We are looking for candidates who are efficient in building data pipelines, processing data and maintaining data-stores for consumption by key stakeholders. You will have responsibility for performance, reliability, security, automation and observability across transactional and analytical workloads.

This is a critical position in our Smart Factory group, with significant autonomy and opportunity to develop and progress. We are offering a highly competitive benefits package for the role, with Visa sponsorship and relocation support to the North East of England available for the right candidate.

Key tasks

• Provide 1st-line DBA support: own and resolve escalated database incidents and requests.
• Backup, restore and disaster recovery: author and practice DR plans, run restore drills, validate backups and enforce retention.
• Execute database upgrades and change management: plan/coordinate upgrades with rollback plans and compatibility testing.
• Maintaining, monitoring and observability of database solutions; own dashboards, SLOs, logging, metrics and actionable alerts.
• Administer high availability database setups on-premises or Cloud base.
• Security and compliance: manage IAM/ACLs, encryption (at rest/in transit), secrets management, access reviews and audit logging.
• Agile and Jira: experience in Agile teams (Scrum/Kanban); create/refine user stories, estimate and prioritise work, and use Jira to manage boards and track progress.
• CI/CD for schema and infra changes; Capacity planning - forecasting growth.
• Troubleshoot performance and incidents; lead incident response, MTTR ownership, RCA and continuous improvements.
• Cost and resource governance: tagging, quota controls, cost monitoring and chargeback recommendations.
• Mentoring and documentation: maintain runbooks, knowledge base, and coach engineers on DB best practices.
• Vendor/third‑party management: manage managed‑service support relationships and SLAs.

Qualifications and training

You will ideally educated to degree level (in a relevant subject like Software Development) or will possess equivalent experience. Certifications in Oracle DBA, Microsoft SQL server or AWS/Azure would be highly beneficial.

Skills and experience

ESSENTIAL

• Significant experience of administering, monitoring, and maintaining Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases.
• Operational practices: HA/replication, backups, DR, change management and on-call experience
• Databases: Strong knowledge of indexing, query plans, schema refactoring and OLTP & OLAP patterns.
• Experience in DBA/DevOPS best practices in a high-volume environment, ideally manufacturing
• Experience with advanced reporting tools (e.g. Power BI, Tableau, or SSRS).
• Knowledge of tooling: Query Insights, SQL Diagnostic Manager, Cassandra.
• Experience of monitoring & logging: Cloud Monitoring, New Relic or equivalent; database alerting strategy.
• Security & compliance: IAM, VPC, encryption, secrets management and audit logging.
• Excellent communication skills: Strong documentation, runbook writing and stakeholder collaboration.
• Cloud: Production experience with AWS/Azure.

DESIRABLE

• Strong experience with ETL data pipelines with intermediate knowledge of Python.
• Containers & orchestration: Kubernetes basics where DB tooling/operators are used.
• Semiconductor manufacturing experience, and knowledge of industry standards, would be advantageous.

Candidates who do not meet every requirement but feel their skills are a good fit for the role the role are encouraged to apply.

Pragmatic is committed to equity, equality, diversity, and inclusion; we strive to welcome everyone and create inclusive teams. We celebrate difference and encourage everyone to be themselves at work. Please let us know if you would like any adjustments to our application and interview process.