Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer

Higlobe, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Higlobe, Inc. seeks a senior database platform engineer to own the data estate across SQL Server and MySQL in AWS. You will lead a time-critical OS and database upgrade, implement standards, and drive SOC 2 readiness.

You will manage two stacks (C#/.NET SQL Server on EC2 and TypeScript/JavaScript with MySQL on AWS), ensure high availability, cost efficiency, and data observability, and mentor teams on data access best practices.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional experience with SQL Server and data estates.
• Deep, current SQL Server administration and upgrades.
• Experience with EC2-based self-managed SQL Server and OS-level work.
• Windows Server administration including upgrades and migrations.
• High availability experience (Always On, failover clustering).
• MySQL administration.
• AWS services experience (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch).
• Data standards, schema review, and data-access design across apps.
• Excellent English communication.

Responsibilities

• Own the database and data estate end to end, assess the current state, and plan upgrades.
• Lead a time-critical OS upgrade and SQL Server upgrade with minimal downtime.
• Decide on self-managed EC2 vs AWS RDS after upgrade for future posture.
• Define and enforce database standards across stacks (C#/.NET, TypeScript/MySQL).
• Establish backup, monitoring, DR testing, and data governance aligned with SOC 2.
• Provide data observability and capacity forecasting against SLAs.
• Drive data engineering collaboration on schema design and data access across teams.
• Mature two-stack environment (SQL Server on EC2 and MySQL on RDS) in AWS.

Skills

SQL Server administration

Windows Server administration

AWS usage

Data governance and data quality

English communication

End-to-end ownership

Upgrade/migration planning

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering/Computer Science

Tools

SQL Server

MySQL

Snowflake

AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch)

Job description

Requirements

Must-haves

• 7+ years of professional experience
• Deep and current Microsoft SQL Server administration
• Hands-on experience with SQL Server installation and configuration on a self-managed server (EC2 or on-premise), including OS-level work beneath a live production instance
• Experience with Windows Server administration, including OS upgrades and migrations
• Recently performed SQL Server upgrade, including source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, and the Windows Server version pairing
• Experience with SQL Server high availability (Always On Availability Groups, failover clustering)
• Experience with MySQL administration
• Experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch)
• Proficiency with AI tools (e.g., Claude) applied to daily work
• Prior end-to-end ownership of a production database estate, including assessing an
• inherited environment and driving it to a measurably better state
• Experience setting data standards and reviewing schema and data-access design
• across application teams
• Strong communication skills in both spoken and written English

What makes you stand out

• Most recent SQL Server upgrade performed, stated on the profile: source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, year, and the Windows Server version pairing

1. Why this role exists:

• This position reports into the Platform team and serves as the top technical authority on data for both engineering groups
• The pressing need is someone able to jump straight into a time-sensitive OS upgrade ahead of year-end
• The broader mandate is bringing the estate to a standard that holds up with customers, auditors, and the insurer
• The company was formed through a merger and runs two separate stacks, with no single owner accountable for the estate to date
• We're looking for someone motivated to solve this at the root rather than apply a temporary fix, with the mandate to do so

Nice-to-haves

• Startup experience
• Snowflake administration and development
• ETL pipelines and tools (e.g., Rivery, dbt)
• Data warehouse design and development
• Data lake on S3
• BI/analytics tools (e.g., Metabase, QuickSight)
• Data governance and data quality practice
• SQL Server migration to a managed service
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent

What you will work on

Own the database and data estate end to end: assess what we have, run a time-critical upgrade as the first job, and then set the direction and standards that mature the whole environment

The company is the product of a merger, so we run two stacks — C#/.NET on Microsoft SQL Server, and TypeScript/JavaScript on MySQL — both in AWS

Our SQL Server is BYOL on EC2: we install, configure, and operate it ourselves, an on-premise setup that happens to live in AWS. MySQL runs on RDS

First 90 days

1. Assess the current estate: inventory, backup and recovery posture, high availability configuration, monitoring and alerting gaps, access model, capacity, and cost.

2. Produce a written state-of-the-estate and a prioritized remediation plan

Near-term priority

1. Upgrade the Windows Server OS hosting our production SQL Server estate — Windows Server 2016 → 2022 — across an Always On Availability Group cluster, with no data loss and minimal downtime. Must do before the end of 2026

2. Then upgrade the SQL Server version from our current SQL Server 2017, and own the recommendation on whether we stay self-managed on EC2 or move to AWS RDS managed SQL Server after the upgrade.

Core ownership

1. Full ownership of administration, operation,s and optimization for all relational databases: SQL Server (self-managed on EC2) and MySQL (RDS)

2. Performance tuning, monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery, high availability and failover, security and access management, capacity and cost

Maturing the estate

1. Define and enforce database standards across the C#/.NET SQL Server and TypeScript/MySQL codebases; act as the technical authority on schema and data-access design for both engineering teams

2. Own data observability: monitoring, alerting, and capacity forecasting against agreed service levels

3. Establish backup and DR testing, access governan,ce and change control that stand up to SOC 2 and our cyber insurer

4. Produce and maintain a data platform roadmap covering both relational stacks, Snowfl,ake and the analytics estate

5. Set direction for the data engineering team on database matters

Secondary

1. Snowflake administration, including usage and cost monitoring

2. Database development — stored procedures, schema design, query optimization

3. Data warehouse and data engineering work alongside the data platform team; support internal and external analytics and BI