JOB SUMMARY
The Senior Manager, Database Engineering leads the team accountable for the availability, performance, security, and lifecycle of NCLH's database estate across Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, running both in AWS and aboard the fleet. This is a working leadership role over a blended organization: the incumbent leads and develops a core team of NCLH database engineers and governs delivery from a managed-service team, working through that partner's tower lead, which performs much of the day-to-day run-state database work and scales up for project delivery. Technical direction and roadmap remain with NCLH; the partner executes against them. The role governs the operating model for databases supporting revenue-generating reservation platforms, onboard guest and crew systems, and enterprise applications, and serves as the organization's senior technical authority on database resilience, architecture, and commercial platform stewardship.
POSITION RESPONSIBILITIES
- Own availability, resilience, and recovery across all database platforms in cloud and shipboard environments, including high-availability and failover design appropriate to each platform and location, and recovery point and recovery time objectives by application tier validated through restore testing.
- Lead database incident response, root cause analysis, and problem management to closure, serving as third-line escalation for major or unresolved incidents in a 24/7 operating environment.
- Own the technical roadmap and direction for the database estate and set the priorities the managed-service team delivers against, working through the partner's DBA tower lead to define acceptance criteria, accept deliverables, and escalate within the partner's management chain when delivery falls short.
- Define quality standards, escalation paths, and competency expectations for partner delivery, plan delivery capacity as the partner team scales with project demand, and ensure the knowledge that delivery produces is retained by NCLH.
- Lead, develop, and retain a team of database engineers, carrying hiring, performance management, development, and compensation recommendation authority, and provide hands-on technical mentorship that builds cross-platform depth and develops senior engineers into technical project leads.
- Own the database monitoring and observability toolchain, managing performance and capacity from instrumented trend data.
- Own the patching and version-currency cadence across all platforms and locations, and extend the organization's infrastructure-as-code and GitOps standards to database provisioning and configuration, maintaining drift detection so environments running the same engine do not diverge across the fleet.
- Govern database change management standards, including approvals, scheduling, and rollback expectations, and own schema change review in partnership with application and DevOps teams.
- Partner with reservation systems teams on operating standards for the Seaware database estate, and act as a primary technical interface to the platform vendor on database matters.
- Own the database layer of onboard systems, including guest and crew applications and onboard property management platforms, designing for local autonomy, constrained connectivity, and physically separated onboard datacenters.
- Own database access models, privileged access governance, and credential lifecycle with Information Security, ensuring secrets are managed through the enterprise secrets platform and that encryption and audit-logging posture is appropriate to each system's data classification.
- Partner with Information Security and Risk & Compliance to ensure database designs and controls meet regulatory and audit requirements (e.g., SOX, PCI DSS) and embed security by design.
- Maintain an authoritative inventory of database deployments and license entitlements, serve as technical lead for database vendor audits and information requests, and advise on edition, metric, and deployment decisions affecting cost and commercial risk in partnership with Software Asset Management, Procurement, and Legal.
- Perform other job-related functions as assigned.
QUALIFICATIONS
Required
- Deep, hands-on production expertise in either Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle, plus strong production depth in at least one additional enterprise relational database platform, with demonstrated experience setting standards across a heterogeneous multi-engine estate.
- Working knowledge of Oracle database operations and licensing models, sufficient to govern an Oracle estate and direct specialist resources.
- Demonstrated leadership of managed cloud database services at scale (AWS RDS, Aurora, or equivalent).
- Experience delivering through blended teams of employees, contractors, or managed-service partners, including setting priorities, defining acceptance criteria, reviewing technical quality, and escalating delivery issues.
- Designed and implemented high-availability and disaster recovery solutions, including participation in real failover, restore, or recovery events.
- Ownership of backup, restore, and recovery objective definition and validation in production.
- Change and patch management experience in a 24/7 environment where downtime carries direct revenue or guest impact.
- Working knowledge of commercial database licensing models, including participation in at least one renewal, true-up, or vendor audit cycle.
- Recent hands-on production database experience, with the ability to evaluate technical work directly and communicate risk, tradeoffs, and investment needs to senior non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred
- Prior direct people-management responsibility for database engineers, and formal vendor-governance experience.
- Deep expertise across both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.
- Experience with distributed, edge, or intermittently connected estates, such as maritime, remote site, retail, or field operations.
- Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform or OpenTofu) and GitOps-managed infrastructure.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes-adjacent database operations and declarative cloud resource provisioning.
- Hospitality, cruise, travel, or reservation systems domain experience.
- Experience consolidating database estates across multiple brands, business units, or post-acquisition environments.
DEGREE TYPE: Bachelor's Degree
FIELD(S) OF STUDY: Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field
EXPERIENCE
- 8+ years of progressive database administration or database engineering experience, including 3+ years leading technical delivery as a people manager, technical lead, project lead, service owner, or senior individual contributor accountable for outcomes across other engineers or delivery partners.
- Equivalent combinations of education and relevant professional experience will be considered in place of a formal degree.
COMPETENCIES & SKILLS
- Multi-engine database administration across Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, including AWS managed database services (RDS, Aurora) at production scale.
- High availability, disaster recovery, and backup and restore validation.
- Database performance tuning, capacity planning, and observability tooling.
- Patch and version lifecycle management, configuration standards, drift detection, and infrastructure-as-code and GitOps-managed database operations.
- Database change and schema governance in a controlled, auditable environment.
- Database security, privileged access governance, and secrets management, with working knowledge of security and compliance frameworks (PCI DSS, SOX) and their application to data architecture.
- Commercial database licensing models, vendor audit support, and managed-service delivery governance.
- People leadership, mentorship, and technical talent development, with sound judgment during time-sensitive incidents.
- Clear communication of technical risk to executive stakeholders and cross-functional influence with application, infrastructure, and security teams.
CERTIFICATIONS & LICENSES
None required. The following are preferred but not a substitute for demonstrated experience:
- Microsoft or Oracle database platform certifications.
- AWS Certified Database – Specialty, or AWS Solutions Architect.
