Senior Database Platform Engineer: Cloud & SQL Mastery

Howden Group; Greater London; Remote; GBP 85,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Learning budget

Challenging technical problems

Blameless post-mortems

Job summary

Howden Group is seeking a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance and evolution of our database platforms. You will work hands-on with SQL Server and Azure SQL, help modernise towards PostgreSQL and cloud-native services, and collaborate across Platform, Data, and Operations teams to ensure resilient data services.

The role emphasises automation, observability, security and incident response, with remote-first flexibility and occasional travel to London for planning

Qualifications

• 5+ years database engineering or DBA experience
• Strong SQL Server expertise incl. administration, tuning & troubleshooting
• Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery incl. backup/restore planning
• Experience managing production services
• Strong troubleshooting across database, infra & apps
• Monitoring/observability in enterprise environments
• Automation using PowerShell or Python
• Strong database security, access control & governance
• Experience with incident, problem & change management processes

Responsibilities

• Own operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms
• Provision, configure and maintain production/non-production databases
• Plan and execute upgrades, patching and lifecycle activities
• Diagnose database performance issues across infra, workloads and apps
• Establish and maintain database standards and engineering practices
• Manage platform capacity, utilization and performance forecasting
• Ensure security, resilience and operational supportability of platforms
• Design, implement and validate backup, recovery and DR capabilities
• Own restore testing and recovery readiness across platforms
• Support high availability solutions and resilience initiatives
• Automate proactive monitoring and observability for database services
• Participate in incident response and post-incident reviews
• Drive continual improvement through automation and RCA
• Reduce operational toil via self-healing where practical
• Support evolution toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native services
• Define and improve deployment/configuration standards
• Contribute to migration and modernization initiatives
• Evaluate new technologies and operating models
• Assist data platform integration with Databricks and analytics services
• Collaborate with Data Engineers to optimize data movement

Skills

SQL Server

Azure SQL

PostgreSQL

PowerShell

Python

Observability

Security governance

Incident management

Collaboration

Tools

Databricks

Terraform

Azure

Bicep

Job description

Howden Group is seeking a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance and evolution of our database platforms. You will work hands-on with SQL Server and Azure SQL, help modernise towards PostgreSQL and cloud-native services, and collaborate across Platform, Data, and Operations teams to ensure resilient data services.

The role emphasises automation, observability, security and incident response, with remote-first flexibility and occasional travel to London for planning