Remote-First Senior Database Platform Engineer

Howden; Greater London; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Learning budget

Challenging technical challenges

Grown-up engineering culture

Flexible adjustments

Job summary

Howden is seeking a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms. You’ll manage SQL Server, Azure SQL, and guide migration toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native services.

This hands-on role involves troubleshooting, automation, and shaping future data platforms across teams. You’ll design backups, DR capabilities, monitoring, and incident handling while improving data platform integration with analytics workloads.

Qualifications

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

Responsibilities

• Own the operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms.
• Provision, configure and maintain production and non-production database environments.
• Plan and execute upgrades, patching and platform lifecycle activities.
• Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infra, workloads and app interactions.
• Establish and maintain database operational standards and engineering practices.
• Manage platform capacity, utilisation and performance forecasting.
• Ensure critical database platforms remain secure, resilient and operationally supportable.
• Design, implement and validate backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Own restore testing and recovery readiness across critical platforms.
• Support high availability solutions and service resilience initiatives.
• Implement proactive monitoring, alerting and observability for database services.
• Participate in incident response, problem management and post-incident reviews.
• Drive continual improvement through automation, root cause analysis and operational learning.
• Reduce operational toil through self-healing and automation where practical.
• Support the evolution towards PostgreSQL and modern cloud-native database services.
• Define and improve database deployment, configuration and operational standards.
• Contribute to migration and modernisation initiatives across legacy platforms.
• Help reduce technical debt through platform simplification and standardisation.
• Evaluate new database technologies and operating models where they create business value.
• Support integration between database platforms, Databricks and analytics services.
• Work with Data Engineers to optimise data movement and workload performance.
• Contribute database expertise to modern data platform initiatives.
• Help ensure database services can support emerging analytics and AI workloads.
• Implement and maintain RBAC and database security standards.
• Support audit, compliance and governance activities.
• Manage database access processes and periodic reviews.
• Ensure database services align with security and operational policies.
• Produce operational evidence and documentation for regulatory purposes.

Skills

SQL Server

Azure SQL

Performance tuning

Troubleshooting

Automation (PowerShell/Python)

Security governance

Incident & change mgmt

Monitoring/Observability

IaC (Terraform/Bicep)

DB administration

Tools

PostgreSQL

Databricks

Terraform

Bicep

Azure

Job description

Howden is seeking a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms. You’ll manage SQL Server, Azure SQL, and guide migration toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native services.

This hands-on role involves troubleshooting, automation, and shaping future data platforms across teams. You’ll design backups, DR capabilities, monitoring, and incident handling while improving data platform integration with analytics workloads.