Senior Database Engineer

In this Hybrid role, you will be the first dedicated Database Performance Engineer, owning the performance and scaling of Capital on Tap’s SQL Server estate on Azure. You’ll optimize latency-critical paths, build self-serve tooling, and influence architecture decisions to support a fast-growing fintech platform. You’ll work with a small, cross-functional team of DBAs and SREs to ensure reliability, cost efficiency, and resilient data access. This is a hands-on role with high impact on latency, throughput, and uptime.

• Private Healthcare including dental and opticians services through Vitality
• Worldwide travel insurance through Vitality
• Anniversary Rewards and a fully paid sabbatical
• Salary Sacrifice Pension Scheme up to 7% match
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• 28 days holiday plus bank holidays

• Own query and index performance across the SQL Server estate using execution plans, Query Store, wait statistics, and production telemetry
• Investigate and implement horizontal scaling (multi-cluster, contained AGs, sharding) to support growth
• Reduce bottlenecks on latency-sensitive paths (card authorisation, ledger I/O) within p99 budget
• Own high availability and disaster recovery designs, testing, and runbooks
• Develop self-serve tooling to identify query regressions and enable teams to diagnose performance
• Automate/manual tasks with PowerShell, Python, or Terraform and treat DB configuration as code
• Manage SQL Server cost as a key production metric alongside latency and uptime
• Collaborate with Product Engineering and data analytics to review designs and uplift data access thinking
• Advocate new DB technologies (e.g., graph databases, zero-downtime migrations) and demonstrate their use in EF via C#

• Experience with ORM performance characteristics (Entity Framework)
• Extensive production SQL Server experience at scale (on-prem, Managed Instances, or Azure SQL)
• Deep knowledge of SQL Server internals: optimizer, plan cache, indexing, statistics, locking, tempdb, wait types
• Proven track record of end-to-end performance improvements
• Experience scaling relational data beyond tuning capabilities: partitioning, archival, denormalisation, read replicas
• Proficiency in T-SQL, plus PowerShell or Python, and infrastructure as code
• Hands-on HA/DR design and incident handling
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL and ability to compare pros/cons
• Ability to translate technical tradeoffs to non-database stakeholders

• Strong communication with cross-functional teams
• Self-motivated and ownership-driven
• Data-driven decision making
• Microsoft SQL Server in production at scale
• Azure SQL / Managed Instances
• Query Store and execution plan analysis