Senior Database Platform Engineer

Overview

In this role, you will own the reliability, performance and evolution of Howdens database platforms, driving modernization from SQL Server/Azure SQL toward PostgreSQL and cloud-native lakehouse architectures. You will work closely with Platform, Data and Operations teams to keep data services resilient, scalable and secure, while reducing toil through automation. The role blends hands-on engineering with strategic platform improvements, shaping the future of Howden’s data estate. You’ll operate in a collaborative, outcomes-driven culture that values learning and responsible innovation.

Pay / Benefits

• Remote-first with occasional travel to London
• Learning budget for training and conferences
• Opportunity to work across SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL and Databricks
• Grown-up engineering culture emphasizing automation and evidence-based decisions
• Blameless post-mortems and focus on operational excellence
• Commitment to platform improvement and technical debt reduction

• Own operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms
• Provision, configure and maintain production and non-production database environments
• Plan upgrades, patching and lifecycle activities
• Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infra, workloads and apps
• Establish and maintain database operational standards and engineering practices
• Manage platform capacity, utilization and performance forecasting
• Ensure security, resilience and operational supportability of critical database platforms
• Design, implement and validate backup, recovery and DR capabilities
• Own restore testing and recovery readiness
• Support high availability and service resilience initiatives
• Automate monitoring, observability and incident response
• Drive continual automation and self-healing to reduce toil
• Contribute to migration and modernization initiatives across legacy platforms
• Define and improve deployment, configuration and operational standards
• Evaluate new database technologies and operating models for business value
• Support integration between databases, Databricks and analytics services
• Assist in data platform initiatives to support analytics and AI workloads
• Maintain RBAC and security standards and support governance activities
• Produce evidence and documentation for regulatory and audit purposes

• 5+ years database engineering or DBA experience on production platforms
• Strong SQL Server administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting and optimisation
• Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services
• HA/DR experience including backup, restore and recovery planning
• Experience managing business-critical production services
• Strong troubleshooting across database, infra and application interactions
• Monitoring and observability experience in enterprise environments
• Automation experience using PowerShell, Python or similar
• Strong understanding of database security, access control and governance
• Experience with structured incident, problem and change management processes

• Reliability mindset
• Operational excellence
• Pragmatism over purity
• PostgreSQL administration and engineering
• Experience with Azure cloud platform
• Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or Bicep)