Senior Database Platform Engineer — Remote-First Growth

Devopsroles; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

Learning budget

Challenging technical work

Blameless post-mortems

Platform improvement & debt reduction

Job summary

Howden is hiring a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms. You’ll manage SQL Server and Azure SQL estates, modernise towards PostgreSQL, cloud-native services and lakehouse architectures.

This hands-on role focuses on tuning, upgrades, backups, automation and incident learning. You will collaborate with Platform, Data and Operations teams to ensure resilient, scalable data services for critical workloads and

Qualifications

• 5+ years database engineering or DBA experience supporting production platforms.
• Strong SQL Server expertise including administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting and optimisation.
• Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services.
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery experience including backup, restore and recovery planning.
• Experience managing business-critical production services.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across database, infrastructure and application interactions.
• Monitoring and observability experience within enterprise environments.
• Automation experience using PowerShell, Python or similar scripting languages.
• Strong understanding of database security, access control and governance.
• Experience working within structured 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 infrastructure, workloads and application 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.
• Define and improve database deployment, configuration and operational standards.
• Contribute to migration and modernisation initiatives across legacy database 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 alongside 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 role-based access controls and database security standards.
• Support audit, compliance and governance activities.
• Manage database access processes and periodic reviews.
• Ensure database services align with organisational security and operational policies.
• Produce operational evidence and documentation where required for regulatory and audit purposes.

Skills

5+ years database engineering

SQL Server expertise

Azure SQL

High Availability & DR

Production services ownership

Troubleshooting skills

Monitoring & observability

Automation (PowerShell/Python)

Database security & governance

Incident/change management

Tools

PostgreSQL

Databricks

Terraform

Azure

Job description

Howden is hiring a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms. You’ll manage SQL Server and Azure SQL estates, modernise towards PostgreSQL, cloud-native services and lakehouse architectures.

This hands-on role focuses on tuning, upgrades, backups, automation and incident learning. You will collaborate with Platform, Data and Operations teams to ensure resilient, scalable data services for critical workloads and