Senior SQL Platform Engineer: Reliability & Performance

MRL Consulting Group | Global Niche Technology Recruitment; Singapore; On-site; SGD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

MRL Consulting Group | Global Niche Technology Recruitment is seeking a Senior SQL DBA / Data Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and operational stability of SQL Server environments supporting production applications.

This hands-on role focuses on stability, recoverability, safe deployment, and incident response, working with engineering, DevOps, QA, security, and product teams to reduce production risk and improve system resilience across multiple environments.

Qualifications

• Experience as a DBA, database engineer, or data platform engineer in production environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with Microsoft SQL Server.
• Deep understanding of SQL Server performance tuning, execution plans, indexing, statistics, query optimisation, locking, blocking, and capacity planning.
• Experience with backup, restore, disaster recovery, and recovery testing in production environments.
• Experience with high availability concepts such as AlwaysOn Availability Groups, replication, clustering, or log shipping.
• Proven experience supporting production incidents, defect analysis, and root cause investigations.
• Ability to work closely with software engineers on schema design, migrations, and query performance.
• Experience working across engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, QA, product, and business teams.
• Strong understanding of database security, access control, permissions, and operational governance.
• Experience supporting ETL/ELT, scheduled jobs, data exports, or integration pipelines.
• Exposure to delivery tools such as Azure DevOps, Jira, Git, or similar systems.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills with a structured approach to problem solving.
• Clear communicator with ability to explain technical risk, performance impact, and remediation options.
• Strong ownership mindset and ability to make sound operational decisions under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day operation, stability, performance, and recoverability of SQL Server database environments.
• Support production, QA, UAT, staging, and development database systems used by business-critical applications.
• Manage and improve backup, restore, recovery validation, retention, and disaster recovery processes.
• Support high availability and disaster recovery configurations including replication, failover, and recovery readiness (where applicable).
• Monitor database health including performance, storage, jobs, blocking, deadlocks, replication, and backup status.
• Diagnose and resolve performance issues such as slow queries, execution plan problems, indexing inefficiencies, locking, and resource contention.
• Review schema changes, stored procedures, indexing strategies, and data access patterns with engineering teams.
• Collaborate with engineers and architects to improve database design, stability, and maintainability.
• Support release readiness by validating database scripts, migrations, rollback plans, and deployment dependencies.
• Participate in production incident response for database-related issues and business-impacting defects.
• Lead or contribute to root cause analysis and long-term remediation of database incidents.
• Identify database technical debt, fragile processes, undocumented dependencies, and operational risks.
• Maintain practical documentation for database architecture, backup/restore procedures, HA/DR processes, and operational runbooks.
• Support ETL, data feeds, reporting extracts, integrations, and operational data flows while protecting production stability.
• Improve monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and visibility across database environments.
• Ensure database-related work is tracked and coordinated through agreed delivery and change management tool

Skills

Microsoft SQL Server

SQL performance tuning

Backup and recovery planning

High availability concepts

Incident response

Schema design collaboration

Technical communication

Operational governance

ETL/ELT data pipelines

Tools

Azure DevOps

Jira

Git

Job description

MRL Consulting Group | Global Niche Technology Recruitment is seeking a Senior SQL DBA / Data Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, and operational stability of SQL Server environments supporting production applications.

This hands-on role focuses on stability, recoverability, safe deployment, and incident response, working with engineering, DevOps, QA, security, and product teams to reduce production risk and improve system resilience across multiple environments.