Senior DB Platform Engineer - Remote, Cloud & Automation

Howden Group Services Limited; City Of London; Remote; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first with occasional travel to

Real learning budget

Challenging technical challenges

Grown-up engineering culture

Documentation and post-mortem culture

Job summary

Howden Group Services Limited seeks a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance and evolution of our database platforms. You will manage SQL Server and Azure SQL, drive modernisation toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native services, and partner with Platform, Data and Operations teams to deliver resilient data services.

The role emphasizes automation, improved observability, incident response and continual improvement as we evolve our data platforms and lakehouse

Qualifications

• 5+ years database engineering or DBA experience
• 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
• 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 RBAC and database security standards
• Support audit, compliance and governance activities
• Manage database access processes and periodic reviews
• Ensure database services align with organisational policies
• Produce operational evidence and documentation for regulatory and audit purposes

Skills

Database engineering

SQL Server administration

Troubleshooting

Automation

Tools

Azure SQL

PostgreSQL

Databricks

Terraform or Bicep

Job description

Howden Group Services Limited seeks a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance and evolution of our database platforms. You will manage SQL Server and Azure SQL, drive modernisation toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native services, and partner with Platform, Data and Operations teams to deliver resilient data services.

The role emphasizes automation, improved observability, incident response and continual improvement as we evolve our data platforms and lakehouse