Senior Database Platform Engineer

Overview

In this role you will own the reliability, performance and evolution of Howden’s database platforms. You will work closely with Platform, Data and Operations teams to keep SQL Server and Azure SQL healthy while helping modernise toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native lakehouse architectures. You’ll troubleshoot, automate, and improve observability to shape the future of our data platforms at scale. This is a hands-on engineering role in a collaborative, growth-minded culture that values practical, evidence-based decisions.

Pay / Benefits

• remote-first with occasional travel to London
• learning budget for training and certifications
• exposure to SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Databricks and AI-enabled services
• blameless post-mortems and emphasis on operational excellence
• documentation-driven culture
• platform improvement and debt reduction

Responsibilities

• Own operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms
• Provision and maintain production and non-production database environments
• Plan upgrades, patching and lifecycle activities
• Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infrastructure, workloads and apps
• Establish and maintain database standards and practices
• Manage platform capacity and performance forecasting
• Ensure security, resilience and operational supportability
• Design and validate backup, recovery and DR capabilities
• Own restore testing and recovery readiness
• Support HA solutions and resilience initiatives
• Implement monitoring, alerting and observability for database services
• Participate in incident response, post-incident reviews and continuous improvement
• Drive automation to reduce toil and enable self-healing
• Support evolution toward PostgreSQL and modern cloud-native services
• Contribute to migrations and modernisation initiatives across legacy platforms
• Support data platform integrations with Databricks and analytics services
• Ensure security governance and compliance for database services
• Document operational evidence and policies for audits and regulatory needs

Key requirements

• 5+ years of database engineering or DBA experience on production platforms
• Strong SQL Server expertise (administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting)
• Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services
• HA/DR experience including backup and recovery planning
• Experience managing production services
• Strong troubleshooting across database, infra and application layers
• Monitoring and observability experience in enterprise environments
• Automation experience using PowerShell or Python or similar
• Strong database security, access control and governance knowledge
• Experience with incident, problem and change management processes

• Reliability mindset
• Operational excellence
• Pragmatism over purity
• PostgreSQL administration
• Databricks administration or integration
• Azure cloud platform

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