About the Role
We are a mid-size financial services company running a high-volume Microsoft SQL Server environment, and we are investing heavily in the long-term stability, transparency, performance, and scalability of our data platform. We are hiring a senior, hands-on engineer to lead that effort.
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This is a combined reliability-and-performance role for an engineer who is equally comfortable owning the observability and incident-response practice across the estate, and getting deep into execution plans and wait statistics to keep the platform fast and resilient under load. You will be the technical center of gravity for the database platform: the person who ensures we see issues early, leads the response when they arise, and engineers durable solutions so they do not recur.
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What You'll Own
Observability & Monitoring
- Stand up and own the monitoring platform, utilizing Query Store across databases, wait-statistics, file-I/O baselines, system health custom Extended Events sessions, and the performance dashboard.
- Define and continuously tune alerting (SQL Agent performance-condition and severity alerts, blocked-process alerts, Database Mail) against established baselines to ensure alarms are trusted and acted upon.
- Establish what "normal" looks like per workload and per time-of-day, alerting on statistical deviation rather than arbitrary thresholds.
Incident Response & Root-Cause Analysis
- Lead incident triage across the database estate.
- Own the post-incident root-cause review process to drive issues to permanent resolution.
- Author and maintain operational runbooks and establish a reliable on-call response practice.
Performance Engineering
- Diagnose and remediate top resource-consuming and lock-holding queries using Query Store, procedure stats, and execution plan analysis.
- Identify and resolve CPU pressure, Tempdb contention, memory-grant waits, and I/O bottlenecks via wait statistics and DMVs.
- Refactor and harden high-impact stored procedures and queries to improve concurrency and reduce contention.
- Own the index strategy, including usage analysis, fragmentation maintenance standards, and the disciplined evaluation of missing-index recommendations.
- Configure Automatic Plan Correction and act decisively on tuning recommendations.
Operations, HA & Coordination
- Own core production operations, including backups, recovery, patching, high availability, capacity planning, and the security baseline.
- Coordinate broader database initiatives across engineering and reporting teams, reporting status and risk directly to the CIO.
- Serve as the deep technical reviewer for the highest-risk queries before they reach the production environment.