Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer

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
• 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

• Assess the current estate: inventory, backup and recovery posture, high availability configuration, monitoring and alerting gaps, access model, capacity, and cost.
• Produce a written state-of-the-estate and a prioritized remediation plan
• Near-term priority
• 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
• 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
• Full ownership of administration, operation,s and optimization for all relational databases: SQL Server (self-managed on EC2) and MySQL (RDS)
• Performance tuning, monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery, high availability and failover, security and access management, capacity and cost
• Maturing the estate
• 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
• Own data observability: monitoring, alerting, and capacity forecasting against agreed service levels
• Establish backup and DR testing, access governan,ce and change control that stand up to SOC 2 and our cyber insurer
• Produce and maintain a data platform roadmap covering both relational stacks, Snowfl,ake and the analytics estate
• Set direction for the data engineering team on database matters
• Secondary
• Snowflake administration, including usage and cost monitoring
• Database development — stored procedures, schema design, query optimization
• Data warehouse and data engineering work alongside the data platform team; support internal and external analytics and BI