Senior SQL DBA — Database expertise and hands-on product engineering ability. The majority of your time (~70%) will be focused on owning the reliability, performance, and scalability of the databases powering our SaaS product line. The remaining ~30% puts you directly in the product engineering flow: designing schemas for new features, driving performance initiatives from conception to production, and taking ownership of database-centric feature work.
You will write and review code, contribute to product roadmap discussions, and collaborate closely with product engineers to ensure data architecture decisions are made correctly the first time.
Key Responsibilities
Database Operations & Reliability (~40% of role)
• Own day-to-day health monitoring, alerting, and on-call rotation for production databases supporting mission-critical SaaS workloads.
• Design and maintain backup, recovery, and disaster recovery procedures; validate RTO/RPO targets regularly.
• Manage patching, upgrades, and version lifecycle across all database environments (dev, staging, production).
• Investigate and resolve database incidents end-to-end, including post-mortems and root cause analysis.
Performance Optimization (~30% of role)
• Proactively identify and remediate slow queries, locking issues, and resource bottlenecks using execution-plan analysis and profiling tools.
• Design and implement sharding, partitioning, read replicas, and caching strategies to support product growth.
• Establish query performance benchmarks and own regressions through to resolution — across both infrastructure changes and code deployments.
• Partner with product engineers to review query patterns and indexes before they reach production.
Data Modeling & Schema Design (~15% of role)
• Serve as the primary reviewer and approver for all schema changes, migrations, and data model proposals across the product line.
• Lead schema design for new product features — working directly with product and engineering teams from the earliest stages of planning.
• Define and enforce standards for naming conventions, migration workflows, rollback strategies, and zero-downtime deployments.
• Evaluate and guide adoption of new data modeling patterns (e.g., event sourcing, CQRS, multi-tenancy strategies) as the product evolves.
Feature Development & Product Engineering (~15% of role)
• Take direct ownership of database-centric product features — from design through deployment — writing backend code where the data layer is the core concern.
• Contribute to code reviews across the engineering team, with a focus on data access patterns, ORM usage, and query correctness.
• Build and maintain internal tooling that improves database visibility, migration safety, and developer experience for the broader engineering team.
• Participate in sprint planning and roadmap discussions, representing the database platform perspective on scope and feasibility.
Security, Compliance & Architecture
• Enforce role-based access control (RBAC), least-privilege principles, and audit logging across all database systems.
• Ensure compliance with SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, and other applicable regulatory frameworks as they relate to data at rest and in transit.
• Evaluate and recommend database technologies and cloud-managed services aligned with our multi-tenant SaaS architecture.
• Mentor and level up junior and mid-level engineers on database design, performance, and operational best practices.
Required Qualifications
• 7+ years of production database engineering/DBA experience, with at least 3 years in a SaaS or cloud-native environment on Microsoft Azure.
• Deep expertise in Azure SQL Database / SQL Managed Instance and/or Azure Cosmos DB, including indexing strategies, query performance tuning, partitioning, consistency models, and high availability/geo-replication.
• Strong experience with data modeling and schema design across both relational and NoSQL systems, supporting complex and evolving product domains.
• Proven ability to design and optimize workloads for scale, including workload isolation, throughput optimization (DTvCores, RU/s), and cost-performance tradeoffs in Azure.
• Demonstrable software engineering skills — able to write, read, and review backend application code (e.g., Python, C#, Java, Go, or similar) interacting with Azure data services. Strong command of performance optimization: execution-plan analysis, indexing strategies, query refactoring, and profiling tooling.
• Experience with high-availability configurations: replication, failover, connection pooling.
• Comfortable working in an Agile/DevOps environment with CI/CD pipelines that include automated schema migrations.
• Strong communication skills — able to translate complex data concerns clearly for product managers, engineers, and leadership.
Preferred Qualifications
• Experience with Azure-native data stores, including Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB (Core/SQL API, Mongo API), and Azure Cache for Redis, in a production SaaS environment.
• Strong understanding of data modeling and access patterns for both relational and NoSQL systems within Azure, including partitioning strategies and RU optimization in Cosmos DB.
• Experience with database observability and monitoring tools such as Azure Monitor, Application Insights, and third-party platforms (e.g., Datadog) for performance tuning and diagnostics.
• Experience designing and operating multi-tenant SaaS architectures in Azure, including tenant isolation strategies (database-per-tenant, schema-per-tenant, and shared database with row-level security).
• Knowledge of event-driven and data integration patterns using Azure services such as Event Hubs, Service Bus, and Change Feed in Cosmos DB; familiarity with CDC concepts.
• Solid understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles, with experience using tools like Terraform, Bicep, or ARM templates for provisioning and managing Azure data resources.
• Relevant certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate, Azure Data Engineer Associate, or equivalent cloud database certifications
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