In this role you will own the reliability, performance and evolution of Howden's database platforms. You will work closely with Platform, Data and Operations teams to keep SQL Server and Azure SQL healthy while helping modernise toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native lakehouse architectures. You’ll troubleshoot, automate, and improve observability to shape the future of our data platforms at scale. This is a hands-on engineering role in a collaborative, growth-minded culture that values practical, evidence-based decisions.
Pay / Benefits
remote-first with occasional travel to London
learning budget for training and certifications
exposure to SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Databricks and AI-enabled services
blameless post-mortems and emphasis on operational excellence
documentation-driven culture
platform improvement and debt reduction
Responsibilities
Own operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms
Provision and maintain production and non-production database environments
Plan upgrades, patching and lifecycle activities
Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infrastructure, workloads and apps
Establish and maintain database standards and practices
Manage platform capacity and performance forecasting
Ensure security, resilience and operational supportability
Design and validate backup, recovery and DR capabilities
Own restore testing and recovery readiness
Support HA solutions and resilience initiatives
Implement monitoring, alerting and observability for database services
Participate in incident response, post-incident reviews and continuous improvement
Drive automation to reduce toil and enable self-healing
Support evolution toward PostgreSQL and modern cloud-native services
Contribute to migrations and modernisation initiatives across legacy platforms
Support data platform integrations with Databricks and analytics services
Ensure security governance and compliance for database services
Document operational evidence and policies for audits and regulatory needs
Key requirements
5+ years of database engineering or DBA experience on production platforms
Strong SQL Server expertise (administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting)
Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services
HA/DR experience including backup and recovery planning
Experience managing production services
Strong troubleshooting across database, infra and application layers
Monitoring and observability experience in enterprise environments
Automation experience using PowerShell or Python or similar
Strong database security, access control and governance knowledge
Experience with incident, problem and change management processes
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