Senior Database Administrator (MSSQL)

Sapiens; Madrid; On-site; EUR 60,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Sapiens is seeking a Senior SQL Server DBA to join our Global Cloud DBA team in Europe. You will own day-to-day operation, ensuring availability and performance of MSSQL estates hosted on Azure and AWS, with on-call rotation for critical incidents.

The role also includes expanding knowledge to Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL. The position requires 6–10 years of production database experience, strong English communication, and the ability to work across EMEA and US customer bases.

Qualifications

• 6–10 years of hands-on database administration experience in production environments.
• Experience supporting enterprise or managed-services customers under SLAs.
• Bachelor's degree in CS/IT or equivalent practical experience.
• Azure DP-300, AZ-900 or AWS Certified DB Specialty advantages.
• Eligibility to work in Spain.

Responsibilities

• 24×7 production support for MSSQL estates across EMEA and US customers, including incident response and RCA.
• Execute and validate customer scripts and data fixes with backups and rollback ownership.
• Backup/restoration operations and periodic recovery testing (RTO/RPO).
• Database refresh, clone and copy across environments, including masked refreshes for non-production.
• High availability, disaster recovery, and failover testing.
• Performance tuning: queries, indexes, blocking and capacity planning.
• Plan changes with pre/post-backup, validation and maintenance windows.
• Access control, user provisioning, and permission reviews.

Skills

English fluency

Troubleshooting under pressure

Ownership mindset

Cross-skilling

Documentation habit

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/IT

Tools

Microsoft SQL Server

Azure

AWS

Oracle

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Job description

Job Description

We are looking for a senior SQL Server DBA to join our Global Cloud DBA team in Portugal. You will own the day-to-day operation, availability and performance of MSSQL estates hosted on Azure and AWS for GDPR, EMEA and US customers, working a fixed shift aligned to EMEA business hours with rotational on-call responsibility for critical incidents outside those hours. You will also build working capability on Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL as secondary platforms to widen cross-platform coverage. Location: Spain, Madrid

Job Requirements

• 6–10 years of hands-on database administration experience, with a majority on Microsoft SQL Server in production environments.


• Demonstrable experience supporting enterprise or managed-services customers under formal SLAs.


• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or equivalent practical experience.


• Certifications such as Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate (DP-300), Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) or AWS Certified Database — Specialty are an advantage.


• Eligibility to work in Spain.

Professional skills

• Strong written and spoken English; able to communicate directly with customer stakeholders.


• Structured troubleshooting under production pressure, with clear escalation and hand-over discipline across shifts.


• Ownership mindset — validating changes before they reach production and owning the rollback path.


• Willingness to cross-skill into the secondary database platforms; the team actively runs MSSQL Oracle cross-training to widen coverage across the on-call rotation.


• Documentation habit — runbooks, knowledge-base articles and post-incident notes.

Job Responsibilities

• 24×7 production support for MSSQL estates across EMEA, GDPR and US customers — incident response, root-cause analysis and SLA-bound resolution of P1/P2 issues.


• Execution and validation of customer scripts and datafixes against production and pre-production databases, including impact assessment, backup/snapshot before execution and ownership of the rollback path.


• Backup, restore and recovery operations; periodic recovery testing and RTO/RPO validation.


• Database refresh, clone and copy activities across environments, including masked refreshes for non-production.


• High availability and disaster recovery: configuration, monitoring, failover testing and recovery.


• Performance monitoring and tuning — query and index optimisation, blocking and contention analysis, capacity and growth management.


• Planned change delivery: pre-implementation backups, implementation, post-implementation and post-patching validation within agreed maintenance windows.


• Access and permission management, user provisioning and privilege reviews.


• Patching, upgrades and migrations, including cloud migrations and version upgrades.


• Automation of routine operational tasks and contribution to self-healing and monitoring improvements.


• Proactive analysis of recurring incidents to identify and eliminate root causes rather than repeatedly remediating them.