Role & Responsibilities:

- Design, develop, and maintain scalable, secure, highly available SQL Server database architectures for enterprise applications.

- Define database architecture standards, design principles, governance frameworks, and best practices across development, UAT, and production environments.

- Lead the design and implementation of SQL Server High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions, including Always On Availability Groups, Failover Clustering, Replication, Log Shipping, backup, and recovery strategies.

- Analyze and resolve complex database performance issues involving query optimization, execution plans, indexing, blocking, deadlocks, memory, CPU, I/O, TempDB, and transaction logs.

- Establish database performance baselines and proactively identify opportunities for scalability, reliability, and capacity improvement.

- Design and execute SQL Server upgrades, migrations, consolidations, and modernization initiatives, including on-premises to Azure migrations.

- Architect and support Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and SQL Server on Azure VMs where applicable.

- Evaluate database workloads and recommend the appropriate platform based on performance, availability, security, scalability, and cost requirements.

- Develop and maintain database security standards covering authentication, authorization, RBAC, encryption, auditing, access controls, and compliance.

- Automate database administration, monitoring, deployment, and maintenance activities using T-SQL, PowerShell, SQL Server Agent, Azure Automation, or similar tools.

- Collaborate with application architects, developers, DevOps, infrastructure, cloud, security, and business teams to ensure database solutions align with application and business requirements.

- Participate in architecture reviews and provide technical guidance on data modeling, schema design, indexing, partitioning, stored procedures, and database integration.

- Support database integration with CI/CD and DevOps processes, including automated database deployments and release management.

- Lead troubleshooting of critical production incidents and conduct Root Cause Analysis (RCA) with corrective and preventive actions.

- Develop database capacity plans, technology roadmaps, migration strategies, and lifecycle plans.

- Maintain comprehensive architecture documentation, technical standards, operational procedures, and disaster recovery documentation.

- Mentor junior DBAs, developers, and technical team members on SQL Server architecture, performance, security, and operational best practices.

- Evaluate new Microsoft and cloud database technologies and recommend improvements to the organization's database platform.

Preferred Candidate Profile:

- 5 - 10 years of overall IT experience, with strong hands-on experience in Microsoft SQL Server administration, engineering, development, or database architecture.

- Strong expertise in Microsoft SQL Server 2016/2019/2022 and a good understanding of SQL Server internals.

- Proven experience designing and supporting enterprise-scale SQL Server database environments.

- Strong knowledge of SQL Server HA/DR, including Always On Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances, Log Shipping, Replication, Backup and restore, and Disaster recovery.

- Strong hands-on experience in SQL Server performance tuning, including execution plans, Query Store/DMVs, indexing, statistics, blocking, deadlocks, and workload optimization.

- Excellent knowledge of T-SQL, stored procedures, functions, triggers, views, and database design.

- Experience with Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or SQL Server on Azure VMs is highly preferred.

- Experience with on-premises to Azure SQL migrations, database upgrades, modernization, or consolidation is an advantage.

- Good understanding of Azure infrastructure concepts such as compute, storage, networking, security, monitoring, and identity.