SQL Database Reliability Engineer

Description

Responsibilities

• Serve as the lead resource for high-severity SQL Server incidents driving triage diagnostics and resolution in real time.
• Own performance tuning indexing strategies and architecture-level improvements to optimize database systems at scale.
• Proactively monitor database performance system health and workload trends to identify and resolve issues before they impact customers.
• Collaborate with product and development teams to refine schema design improve query performance and enhance overall data architecture.
• Develop and maintain database standards observability dashboards and automation for patching backups and alerting.
• Design and execute comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategies for critical systems.
• Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives including cloud modernization infrastructure as code and capacity planning.
• Author technical documentation including runbooks architecture designs internal KBs and lessons learned.
• Provide mentorship and technical leadership to engineers across support and infrastructure teams.
• Advocate for architectural and operational improvements across teams using data and insight to influence decisions.

• Demonstrate expert-level understanding of SQL Server internals optimization techniques and operational best practices.
• Lead high-stakes conversations and incident calls with clarity confidence and control.
• Understand system-level performance (I/O memory CPU) and how it affects SQL operations.
• Communicate technical issues and solutions to both technical and business stakeholders effectively.
• Analyze recurring incidents to identify trends and permanently resolve root causes.
• Operate autonomously with a sense of ownership and urgency.
• Balance short-term firefighting with long-term architectural planning and automation.

Qualifications

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Information Systems or a related fieldor 5 years of equivalent experience.
• Proven experience in a production-facing SQL Server environment preferably in a SaaS or multi-tenant context.
• Hands-on expertise in:
  • Query tuning indexing and execution plan analysis.
  • High availability replication disaster recovery and backup strategies.
  • Scripting and automation using PowerShell T-SQL or similar.
  • Monitoring and observability tools for SQL Server and infrastructure health.
• Strong familiarity with virtualization storage performance and cloud platforms (e.g. AWS Azure).
• Demonstrated ability to lead incident response and influence cross-functional technical decisions.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills especially under pressure.
• Previous experience mentoring peers or junior engineers is a plus.