Senior Database Platform Engineer

About the role

Howden, a global insurance group, is looking for a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, security and evolution of its database platforms. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a traditional ticket-driven DBA role: you will keep SQL Server and Azure SQL estates healthy, secure and performant while helping modernise data platforms and support a move towards PostgreSQL, cloud-native database services and lakehouse architectures. You will act as the team's database subject matter expert, working with Platform Engineers, Data Engineers and Operations.

Key responsibilities

• Own the operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms, provision and maintain production and non-production environments, and plan upgrades, patching and lifecycle activities
• Diagnose and resolve performance issues, manage capacity and performance forecasting, and establish operational standards
• Design and validate backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities, own restore testing, support high availability and implement monitoring, alerting and observability
• Take part in incident response, problem management and post-incident reviews, and drive improvement through automation and root cause analysis
• Support migration and modernisation towards PostgreSQL and cloud-native services, and integrate database platforms with Databricks and analytics services
• Maintain role-based access controls, support audit and compliance, and document evidence for regulatory and audit purposes

Required profile

• 5+ years of database engineering or DBA experience supporting production platforms
• Experience with business-critical production services, structured incident, problem and change management, and enterprise monitoring and observability
• Preferred: PostgreSQL, enterprise data warehouse, Databricks, cloud migration and lakehouse architecture experience

Required skills

• Strong SQL Server expertise, including administration, performance tuning and optimisation
• Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services; high availability and disaster recovery
• Automation with PowerShell, Python or similar
• Preferred: Terraform or Bicep, modern observability platforms

What we offer

• Remote-first work with occasional travel to London for planning sessions and events
• Training budget for certifications and conferences
• Technical challenges across SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Databricks and emerging AI-enabled services
• Automation-first culture, blameless post-mortems and continuous investment in platform improvement