Associate Director, Relational Database Services

(Managed Services & Consolidation)

Overview

IQVIA is seeking an Associate Director, Relational Database Services to lead the transformation and operation of our global enterprise database platforms. This leader will drive a strategic shift toward a modern, scalable, automation‑first managed service, consolidating a diverse landscape of relational technologies into standardized, resilient, cost‑efficient platforms.

This role is responsible for service strategy, platform engineering, operational excellence, and people leadership across on‑premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Success means higher reliability, faster delivery, reduced complexity, and a consolidated ecosystem grounded in strong engineering and governance.

Key Responsibilities

1. Managed Service Ownership

• Lead the end‑to‑end delivery of IQVIA’s database managed service, including service catalog, SLAs/SLOs, intake, and escalation paths.
• Oversee incident, problem, change, and release management to ensure high availability and predictable delivery.
• Implement standardized operational controls—monitoring/alerting, runbooks, on‑call rotations, and audit‑ready production governance.

2. Database Consolidation & Rationalization

• Develop and execute a multi‑year consolidation strategy to reduce database sprawl and legacy deployments.
• Align applications to standardized architectures through discovery, inventory classification, and migration planning.
• Partner with product/application teams to modernize platforms, eliminate duplicates, and retire end‑of‑life systems.

3. Platform Engineering & Automation

• Champion an automation‑first approach using standardized builds, IaC, CI/CD, automated patching, and self‑service workflows.
• Define and enforce reference architectures for high availability, clustering, backup/recovery, and performance engineering across supported engines.

4. Resiliency, DR, and Capacity Management

• Own availability engineering: failover design, DR planning and testing, and recovery execution.
• Oversee capacity planning, license optimization, and performance tuning across hybrid and multi‑cloud estates.

5. Security, Compliance & Access Governance

• Enforce secure-by-design operations including privileged access controls, encryption, auditability, and policy‑based configuration.
• Ensure compliance aligned with regulatory, data residency, and separation‑of‑duty requirements in collaboration with Security and Risk teams.

6. Vendor, Contract & Cost Management

• Manage vendor relationships, support contracts, renewals, and tooling performance.
• Optimize licensing and platform spend through right‑sizing, standardization, and service tiering (e.g., Bronze/Silver/Gold).

7. People Leadership & Cross‑Functional Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and scale global teams of DBAs and platform engineers (including managed service partners).
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Network, Security, Identity, Application, and Data Platform teams to deliver stable, high‑performing services and successful migrations.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in database engineering/administration or platform operations.
• 5+ years leading engineering or managed service delivery teams.
• Hands‑on leadership experience with Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and legacy/warehouse technologies (e.g., Netezza, Exasol).
• Strong operational rigor across incident/problem/change management, uptime accountability, DR readiness, and capacity/performance.
• Proven success building standardized services (catalog, tiers) and driving large‑scale consolidation or migration programs.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in regulated enterprise environments with strong compliance and security requirements.
• Hybrid/cloud platform expertise (AWS/Azure), including managed database services and connectivity patterns.
• Vendor/license optimization and financial stewardship of platform budgets.
• Track record implementing automation-first patterns across multiple engines and environments.

Leadership Outcomes (Success Profile)

• Significant reduction in database sprawl and bespoke deployments.
• Higher reliability, reduced Sev1/Sev2 incidents, faster recovery, and stronger platform predictability.
• Clear, measurable managed services in place—standardized tiers, automa