Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer
Database Administrator
Must-haves:
- 7+ years of professional experience
- Deep and current Microsoft SQL Server administration
- Hands-on experience with SQL Server installation and configuration on a self-managed server (EC2 or on-premise), including OS-level work beneath a live production instance
- Experience with Windows Server administration, including OS upgrades and migrations
- Recently performed SQL Server upgrade, including source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, and the Windows Server version pairing
- Experience with SQL Server high availability (Always On Availability Groups, failover clustering)
- Experience with MySQL administration
- Experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch)
- Proficiency with AI tools applied to daily work
- Prior end-to-end ownership of a production database estate, including assessing an inherited environment and driving it to a measurably better state
- Experience setting data standards and reviewing schema and data-access design across application teams
- Strong communication skills in both spoken and written English
- What makes you stand out:
- Most recent SQL Server upgrade performed, stated on the profile: source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, year, and the Windows Server version pairing
- Why this role exists:
- This position reports into the Platform team and serves as the top technical authority on data for both engineering groups
- The pressing need is someone able to jump straight into a time-sensitive OS upgrade ahead of year-end
- The broader mandate is bringing the estate to a standard that holds up with customers, auditors, and the insurer
- The company was formed through a merger and runs two separate stacks, with no single owner accountable for the estate to date
- We're looking for someone motivated to solve this at the root rather than apply a temporary fix, with the mandate to do soNice-to-haves:
- Startup experience
- Snowflake administration and developmentETL pipelines and tools (e.g., Rivery, dbt)
- Data warehouse design and development
- Data lake on S3BI/analytics tools (e.g., Metabase, QuickSight)
- Data governance and data quality practiceSQL Server migration to a managed service
- Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent
- What you will work on:
- Own the database and data estate end to end: assess what we have, run a time-critical upgrade as the first job, and then set the direction and standards that mature the whole environment
The company is the product of a merger, so we run two stacks — C#/.NET on Microsoft SQL Server, and TypeScript/JavaScript on MySQL — both in AWSOur SQL Server is BYOL on EC2: we install, configure, and operate it ourselves, an on-premise setup that happens to live in AWS. MySQL runs on RDSFirst 90 days1. Assess the current estate: inventory, backup and recovery posture, high availability configuration, monitoring and alerting gaps, access model, capacity, and cost.2. Produce a written state-of-the-estate and a prioritized remediation plan
Near-term priority1. Upgrade the Windows Server OS hosting our production SQL Server estate — Windows Server 2016 → 2022 — across an Always On Availability Group cluster, with no data loss and minimal downtime. Must do before the end of 20262. Then upgrade the SQL Server version from our current SQL Server 2017, and own the recommendation on whether we stay self-managed on EC2 or move to AWS RDS managed SQL Server after the upgrade.
Core ownership1. Full ownership of administration, operations, and optimization for all relational databases: SQL Server (self-managed on EC2) and MySQL (RDS)2. Performance tuning, monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery, high availability and failover, security and access management, capacity and cost
Maturing the estate1. Define and enforce database standards across the C#/.NET SQL Server and TypeScript/MySQL codebases; act as the technical authority on schema and data-access design for both engineering teams2. Own data observability: monitoring, alerting, and capacity forecasting against agreed service levels3. Establish backup and DR testing, access governance, and change control that stand up to SOC 2 and our cyber insurer4. Produce and maintain a data platform roadmap covering both relational stacks, Snowflake, and the analytics estate5. Set direction for the data engineering team on database matters
Secondary1. Snowflake administration, including usage and cost monitoring2. Database development — stored procedures, schema design, query optimization3. Data warehouse and data engineering work alongside the data platform team; support internal and external analytics and BI