Job description
We’re Civica and we make software that helps deliver critical services for citizens all around the world. From local to state government, to education, to health and care, over 5,000 public bodies across the globe use our software to help provide critical services to over 100 million citizens.
Our aspiration is to be a GovTech champion everywhere we work around the globe, supporting the needs of citizens and those that serve them every day. Building on 21 years of continuous growth and success, we’re at a pivotal point on our journey to realise that aspiration.
As a company, we’re passionate about what we do and the citizens we help to serve. If you too would like to help champion the use of technology in public services, to improve outcomes for citizens and public sector organisations, then Civica is the right place for you. We will help you unlock the best version of yourself, achieve growth in your career whilst making a real difference to people and communities.
Why you will love this opportunity as Lead Database Engineer at Civica
This is not a traditional DBA role. At Civica, as the Lead Database Engineer you will combine the depth of a lead database administrator with the engineering mindset of an SRE. That means you won’t just maintain databases. You’ll design for reliability, automate operations, tune for scale and embed performance engineering into everything we deliver.
You will be responsible for leading a capability to ensure our databases from MS SQL, Informix, PostgreSQL platforms run at peak efficiency, scale reliably with customer demand and recover gracefully under failure. You’ll be at the front line of making sure our customers’ mission-critical workloads are always performant, resilient and secure. Work with both internal and external systems to ensure they are performant, reliable, secure, and scalable
What you will be doing?
- Design, implement and validate high-availability and disaster-recovery strategies (clustering, Always On, log shipping, replication, multi-AZ).
- Build and maintain capacity planning models for storage, CPU, memory and IOPS.
- Run regular failover, backup and restore drills to ensure readiness.
- Automate provisioning, patching, upgrades and schema migrations using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Ansible) and CI/CD pipelines.
- Replace manual DBA runbooks with automated workflows and self-healing scripts.
- Build tooling to enforce consistency in schema changes and DB configuration.
- Define and monitor SLIs/SLOs specifically for databases: query latency, replication lag, backup success and transaction throughput.
- Build detailed dashboards and real-time alerts (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK).
- Lead incident response for database outages, ensuring blameless post-mortems and continuous improvement.
- Enforce database security best practices (encryption at rest/in transit, RBAC, auditing).
- Embed compliance checks (GDPR, HIPAA-equivalent for AU health, etc.) into deployment pipelines.
- Work with InfoSec to align database hardening standards across environments.
- Partner with developers to design efficient schemas and optimise queries before release.
- Provide coaching and guidance to engineers on database reliability practices.
- Share learnings across Civica’s global engineering teams through brown-bags, playbooks and post-mortems.
What you will need to be successful in this role
- Proven experience running SQL Server in production at scale.
- Strong grasp of query execution plans, transaction isolation levels, concurrency control and deadlock detection.
- Hands-on knowledge of indexing strategies, partitioning and storage optimisation.
- Experience designing HA/DR solutions and validating them through drills and failover tests.
- Ability to forecast capacity and plan proactively for growth.
- Strong track record of reducing incidents by engineering reliability into the system.
- Experience automating DBA workflows (backups, restores, migrations, patching) with IaC and scripting.
- Proficiency in scripting/programming (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Go) for database operations.
- Comfort working with CI/CD pipelines to safely roll out schema changes and configuration updates.
- Expertise in tuning databases that support high-transaction systems.
- Hands-on experience with benchmarking tools and methods to validate improvements.
- Ability to design and implement monitoring to catch regressions before they impact customers.
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, able to partner with DBAs, developers and SREs alike.
- Clear communicator who can explain deep technical findings in business-relevant terms.
- Passion for sharing knowledge and raising the bar across the organisation.
- Expertise in-depth query and index analysis using execution plans and performance counters.
- Knowledge to tune queries, schemas and indexing strategies to reduce latency and increase throughput.
- Experience in workload benchmarking and stress testing under realistic concurrency and volume.
- Record of identifying and remediating database anti-patterns (e.g., long-running transactions, blocking chains, deadlocks).
Why you’ll love working with us.
We know that when our people are happy, they will work better and have greater work satisfaction. Here’s what you can expect:
We’re all different - and we love this about us.
We provide an inclusive, safe, and welcoming environment to all Civicans- there are heaps of opportunities to enable you to grow and be your best.
Giving culture - we encourage you to “give back” with benefits such as our Days of Difference leave where you can volunteer for a charity of your choice.
Flexible Work - we have the technology and tools to support you to work from home and come into our offices now and then to catch up and socialise with colleagues.
Apply for this job- Become part of something special Do you see yourself in this role? If so, then we would love to hear from you.
We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. In fact, we strongly believe that diversity of experience contributes to a broader collective perspective that will consistently lead to a better company and better outcomes. We are working hard to increase the diversity of our team wherever we can, and we actively encourage everyone to consider becoming a part of it. We are especially keen to receive applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia.
