Database Operations Lead

Job title: Database Operations Lead

India

(Hybrid)

The Database Operations Lead provides technical and operational leadership for business-critical database services across on-premises and public-cloud environments. The role is accountable for day-to-day service reliability, operational discipline, incident recovery, security, compliance, and continuous improvement across database platforms supporting manufacturing and enterprise applications. Working through technical influence rather than line-management authority, the role coordinates internal teams, service providers, application owners, engineering, cloud, infrastructure, and security stakeholders to deliver resilient, standardized, and measurable database operations.

Your responsibilities

• Lead daily database operations across production and non-production environments, ensuring availability, stability, performance, security, and adherence to agreed service levels.
• Coordinate database support coverage, operational priorities, shift handovers, change windows, escalations, and technical work across internal teams and service partners.
• Own operational governance through service reviews, health dashboards, backlog control, risk tracking, and clear accountability for corrective actions. Establish and maintain standards, runbooks, support procedures, escalation paths, inventories, architecture records, and knowledge articles.
• Act as the senior operational escalation point for database-related risks and service-impacting issues.
• Incident, Problem, and Change Management, Lead technical response and service restoration for major database incidents, including bridge coordination, impact assessment, stakeholder communication, and recovery decisions.
• Drive root-cause analysis and problem management, ensuring corrective and preventive actions are documented, assigned, tracked, and validated.
• Govern database changes, releases, patching, upgrades, and maintenance activities with tested implementation, validation, and rollback plans.
• Analyze recurring incidents, alerts, capacity trends, and failure patterns to reduce operational risk and prevent repeat events.
• Oversee installation, configuration, monitoring, patching, upgrades, lifecycle management, and decommissioning for supported database platforms.
• Ensure effective monitoring of availability, replication, database jobs, CPU, memory, storage, disk I/O, tablespaces, blocking, deadlocks, and other critical health indicators.
• Coordinate performance triage and diagnostic evidence collection; distinguish platform issues from application-code issues and route remediation to the accountable team.
• Partner with application DBAs and development teams on execution plans, indexing, stored procedures, SQL or PL/SQL optimization, and production-readiness reviews.
• Maintain accurate configuration and service inventories, including ownership, criticality, dependencies, lifecycle status, support model, and recovery requirements.

Your skills and experience

Must-Have:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience with 10 or more years of database administration, engineering, or operations experience, including at least 3 years in a technical lead or operational coordination capacity.
• Demonstrated experience supporting business-critical, high-availability, and 24×7 database environments and strong hands-on administration and operations experience with multiple enterprise database technologies, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL or MariaDB; exposure to MongoDB, Sybase, Cassandra, or cloud-native databases is beneficial.
• Expertise in performance diagnostics, capacity management, backup and recovery, high availability, replication, patching, upgrades, security, and lifecycle management.
• Experience with Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or other hybrid-cloud database platforms.
• Working knowledge of automation and scripting using PowerShell, Python, shell scripting, SQL, infrastructure-as-code, or configuration-management tools.
• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms, IT service-management processes, source control, and CI/CD practices.

Nice-To-Have:

• Proven leadership of major incidents, complex migrations, upgrades, recovery exercises, or operational transformation initiatives.
• Relevant database, cloud, security, or ITIL certification is advantageous.
• Ability to participate in scheduled maintenance and critical-incident support outside standard working hours when required.
• Ability to lead through influence, establish accountability, and coordinate work across organizational and supplier boundaries.
• Clear communication with both technical specialists and senior business stakeholders.

More information

Some of our benefits in India:

• Flexible and hybrid working arrangements to support work–life balance
• Health and well-being support – medical insurance for you and your family, health check-ups, life and accident insurance, well-being programs, and employee resource groups
• A minimum of 90 days of Maternity and Paternity Leave based on eligibility
• Personal Support Service 24/7 – a confidential support channel open to all Nokia employees and their families in challenging situations
• Career growth & mobility – technical career paths, job rotations, international assignments, and relocation support
• Continuous learning – technical certifications, mentoring programs, coaching, and digital learning platforms
• Opportunities to innovate and contribute through Nokia’s research and development environment
• Recognition programs that celebrate outstanding contributions
• Workplace support – ergonomic working support and mobile device programs based on eligibility

About Us

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Nokia is a global leader in connectivity for the AI era. With expertise across fixed, mobile and transport networks, powered by the innovation of Nokia Bell Labs, we’re advancing connectivity to secure a brighter world.

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If you’re interested in this role but don’t meet every listed requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences enrich our teams, and you may be just the right candidate for this or another opportunity.

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