Senior SQL DBA

Role overview A multi-tenant SaaS platform serving more than 150 enterprise customers is looking for a seasoned Senior SQL DBA to safeguard database reliability and performance across a fleet of customized client instances. The work is not about big-data scale so much as per-tenant complexity: every customer runs against its own database, with meaningful schema and logic variation, so troubleshooting demands real investigative judgment rather than playbook-style responses. The role blends hands-on incident response, proactive monitoring, and close partnership with the development team.

Responsibilities - Act as the primary escalation point for critical database incidents during US business hours, diagnosing performance, reliability, and availability issues across customized environments. - Partner with developers on SQL query design, stored procedures, and database logic; review performance characteristics and coach the team on tuning best practices. - Build and maintain proactive monitoring, including alerting thresholds, operational runbooks, and dashboards that surface emerging risk before it becomes an outage. - Own the database side of test-environment readiness: refresh test instances, validate configuration, and develop automation that reduces manual setup overhead. - Review and approve database-related pull requests, enforcing coding standards and evaluating changes for performance impact, risk, and backward compatibility. - Schedule routine maintenance such as backups, patching, and capacity planning during business hours to minimize disruption, and document recurring issues and resolutions for team reference.

Requirements - Seven or more years of hands-on DBA experience with genuine production support responsibilities, not solely development-side database work. - Strong SQL Server and T-SQL skills, including deep query optimization and execution-plan analysis. - Comfort working across highly customized, multi-instance environments where no two performance issues are identical. - Demonstrated balance of reactive incident response and proactive, collaborative work with engineering teams. - Ability to operate during US Central or Eastern time, with the role primarily extending afternoon coverage.

Nice to have - Familiarity with Microsoft Azure data platform services. - Exposure to .NET applications and ORM-generated query patterns.

Benefits and work setup - Fully remote position aligned to US Central (or Eastern) business hours. - Long-term investment in the role, with the expectation of maturing processes over time rather than simply working a support queue.