The role is responsible for the reliability, performance, security, resilience, and supportability of Microsoft SQL Server clusters, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database services supporting critical business applications.
This role combines hands-on production support with database platform engineering. It leads complex incident resolution, guides and oversees Level 2 production support DBAs, establishes repeatable support patterns, and converts recurring operational work into standardized automation.
The role is expected to reduce dependence on manually executed SQL queries and one-off administrative actions by moving database changes, maintenance, validation, and evidence collection into version-controlled, tested, and approved release pipelines using GitHub and approved enterprise tooling.
The position owns the engineering patterns needed to support multiple database clusters and managed Azure database services consistently. This includes idempotent automation, reusable deployment components, centralized monitoring, actionable alerting, operational runbooks, recovery validation, and service health reporting.
Solutions must be secure, auditable, resilient, and supportable across on-premises and Azure-hosted database platforms.
Operating within established enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, change management, and service management frameworks, the role partners with Enterprise Applications, Cloud Engineering, Infrastructure Operations, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, Data & Analytics, and managed service providers.
Key Responsibilities
L3 Production Support & Incident Leadership
- Provide senior Level 3 production support and technical escalation for business-critical database platforms and dependent applications.
- Lead diagnosis, stabilization, recovery, and stakeholdercommunication for Priority 1 and Priority 2 incidents involving outages, blocking, deadlocks, performance degradation, failed jobs, replication or availability failures, and data-access issues.
- Coordinate technical recovery across application, infrastructure, cloud, network, security, and vendor teams; clearly communicate impact, risk, recovery actions, and service-restoration status.
- Lead root cause analysis and ensure corrective and preventive actions address systemic causes, not only immediate symptoms.
- Participate in the production on-call rotation, planned maintenance, release support, disaster-recovery exercises, and market-sensitive support activities as required.
L2 Oversight, Escalation & Capability Development
- Provide day-to-day technical direction, work prioritization, escalation support, and quality oversight for Level 2 production support DBAs without creating unnecessary dependency on L3 intervention.
- Define escalation criteria, diagnostic standards, runbooks, knowledge articles, and decision trees that enable L2 personnel to resolve repeatable issues safely and consistently.
- Review L2 incident handling, change execution, access practices, documentation, and operational evidence for completeness, accuracy, and compliance with established controls.
- Coach and mentor L2 DBAs through incident reviews, paired troubleshooting, technical training, and structured knowledge transfer.
- Identify recurring L2 support demand and eliminate avoidable toil through automation, self-service, monitoring improvements, and permanent remediation.
Database Platform Engineering & Service Ownership
- Engineer, operate, and continuously improve SQL Server failover clusters and Always On Availability Groups, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database services.
- Establish reusable platform patterns for configuration, patching, backup, restore, integrity validation, maintenance, security, observability, and lifecycle management across multiple database estates.
- Design idempotent automation that can be executed repeatedly across clusters and Azure services without creating configuration drift, duplicate objects, or inconsistent outcomes.
- Maintain service ownership artifacts, including platform standards, configuration baselines, support models, dependency records, recovery procedures, and operational readiness criteria.
- Provide technical review and production-readiness guidance for database architecture, schema changes, application releases, migrations, and onboarding of new database workloads.
Database DevOps, GitHub & Release Engineering
- Modernize database change delivery by replacing manually executed production SQL with source-controlled SQL database projects, reviewed pull requests, automated validation, and approved release pipelines.
- Design, build, and support GitHub-based CI/CD workflows for database schema, configuration, maintenance, and operational automation across non-production and production environments.
- Implement pipeline controls for build validation, automated testing, schema-drift detection, security scanning, environment-specific configuration, approvals, deployment evidence, rollback or forward-fix planning, and segregation of duties.
- Create reusable pipeline templates and deployment components that support SQL Server, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Database while minimizing platform-specific duplication.
- Partner with application engineering teams to align database and application releases, enforce versioning standards, and improve deployment predictability and auditability.
Monitoring, Automation & Operational Intelligence
- Design and implement database observability covering availability, performance, capacity, backup and restore status, job health, replication, blocking, deadlocks, query regressions, security events, and configuration drift.
- Develop actionable alert thresholds, routing, dashboards, and automated diagnostics that reduce noise while accelerating detection and recovery.
- Automate health checks, maintenance, evidence collection, compliance validation, recovery testing, and recurring support tasks using PowerShell, T-SQL, Python, GitHub Actions, Azure Automation, or approved equivalent tooling.
- Use Query Store, dynamic management views, wait statistics, execution plans, Azure Monitor, and enterprise observability platforms to identify and remediate performance and reliability risks.
- Define measurable service health indicators and use trend analysis to prioritize capacity, resilience, performance, and cost improvements.
Security, Resilience & Governance
- Implement least-privilege access, privileged-access controls, managed identities or service principals, encryption, auditing, credential protection, and secure secret handling in coordination with Cybersecurity and Identity teams.
- Ensure database changes and administrative actions follow approved change, release, access, and evidence-retention requirements, with emergency changes used only when justified and retrospectively reviewed.
- Design, operate, and test high-availability, backup, restore, and disaster-recovery capabilities aligned with approved business recovery requirements.
- Identify control gaps, unsupported configurations, end-of-life risks, resilience weaknesses, and technical debt; document risk and drive remediation through the appropriate governance process.
- Support audit, risk assessment, control testing, architecture review, and production-readiness activities with complete and reproducible evidence.
Technical Qualifications
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of database administration, database engineering, or production support experience in enterprise environments, including substantial senior L3 responsibility for business-critical services.
- Advanced hands-on expertise with Microsoft SQL Server, including performance tuning, Query Store, execution plans, locking and blocking, backup and recovery, SQL Agent, security, patching, and lifecycle management.
- Deep experience with SQL Server high-availability and disaster-recovery technologies, including Always On Availability Groups and Windows Server Failover Clustering.
- Production experience with Azure SQL Managed Instance and Azure SQL Database, including service configuration, monitoring, performance, availability, security, backup, and connectivity considerations.
- Demonstrated experience leading complex incidents, root cause analysis, problem management, and durable remediation in environments with formal service-level and change-control expectations.
- Experience providing technical oversight, escalation support, mentoring, and quality review for L2 database administrators or production support engineers.
- Strong automation skills using PowerShell and T-SQL, with working capability in Python, Azure CLI, or equivalent scripting and automation technologies.
- Experience with Git, GitHub, pull-request workflows, SQL database projects, CI/CD concepts, and automated database release practices.
- Strong understanding of ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change, release, configuration, and knowledge-management practices.
- Ability to communicate technical risk, operational impact, recovery status, and recommended actions clearly to engineering, application, business, and leadership stakeholders.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting regulated financial services, private credit, asset management, capital markets, or another environment with high availability, audit, and data-protection expectations.
- Experience implementing GitHub Actions or comparable release pipelines for SQL database projects, DACPAC-based deployments, migration frameworks, and configuration automation.
- Experience with Datadog, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Splunk, SQL Sentry, Redgate, Grafana, or comparable observability tooling.
- Experience with infrastructure as code, policy as code, automated compliance validation, and secrets-management platforms.
- Relevant Microsoft certifications, such as Azure Database Administrator Associate, Azure Administrator Associate, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, or equivalent credentials.
