Senior Database Performance Engineer - SQL Server on Azure

Sponsor Finder; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 125,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private Healthcare

Annual learning budget

Family/Parental benefits

Cycle to work

2 days in London office per week

Pet and dog friendly offices

Team events and learning days

Sabbatical options

Salary sacrifice pension

Bike to work scheme

Job summary

Capital on Tap is seeking a Database Performance Engineer to own performance and scale of our SQL Server estate on Azure. You will join a small, senior, hands‑on team of DBAs and SREs to optimize latency, cost and reliability.

You'll own performance tuning, HA/DR, and tooling, and collaborate with engineering and analytics to improve data access and architecture while shaping the future of our distributed data platform.

Qualifications

• Experience with ORM tradeoffs, especially Entity Framework.
• Proven production scale with Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL.
• Deep understanding of query optimiser, plan cache and stats.
• Track record of end‑to‑end performance wins in production.
• Ability to scale relational data with partitioning, caching, read replicas.
• Ability to write production code in T‑SQL, PowerShell or Python.
• Hands‑on HA/DR design and handling production incidents.
• Comfort translating complex DB concepts to non‑DB engineers.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and other engines is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own query and index performance across SQL Server estate using telemetry.
• Investigate and implement horizontal scaling for a fast growing user base.
• Identify bottlenecks on latency critical paths and enforce p99 budgets.
• Own high availability, disaster recovery, backups, and runbooks.
• Build self‑serve tooling for diagnosing query regressions.
• Automate tasks with PowerShell, Python, or Terraform; treat DB config as code.
• Manage SQL Server cost as a key metric alongside latency and uptime.
• Collaborate with Product Eng and analytics on data access designs.
• Advocate advanced DB technologies and migrations to production.

Skills

EF performance

SQL Server scaling

Query optimizer

T-SQL expert

PowerShell

Python

Infrastructure as code

HA/DR design

PostgreSQL knowledge

Technical communication

Tools

Azure SQL

Query Store

Terraform

Azure

SQL Server

PostgreSQL

Job description

Capital on Tap is seeking a Database Performance Engineer to own performance and scale of our SQL Server estate on Azure. You will join a small, senior, hands‑on team of DBAs and SREs to optimize latency, cost and reliability.

You'll own performance tuning, HA/DR, and tooling, and collaborate with engineering and analytics to improve data access and architecture while shaping the future of our distributed data platform.