Engineer III - Azure SQL Cloud Database Dev

Position: Engineer III - Azure SQL Cloud Database Developer (8 to 12 years of experience) Primary Purpose of the position: The Azure SQL Cloud Database Developer is responsible for designing, developing, optimizing, securing, monitoring, and maintaining cloud database platforms that support business-critical applications. This role has a strong database development focus and partners closely with application development, product, architecture, and operations teams to ensure database solutions are scalable, reliable, cost-effective, secure, and aligned with product delivery needs. The role provides hands-on support for Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL performance tuning, schema design, indexing strategy, data modeling, backup and recovery, disaster recovery planning, production troubleshooting, database standards, and optimization opportunities that may require changes in application code and data access patterns.
Skills, Competencies, Experience and Responsibilities: • Develop, monitor, secure, administer, and support Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL databases, elastic pools, Azure SQL Managed Instance where applicable, and related cloud database services, ensuring availability, performance, reliability, and operational readiness. • Develop a strong understanding of supported business products, workflows, SLAs, data-critical domains, operational dependencies, and current database architecture to guide informed database decisions. • Optimize database and application performance through query tuning, indexing strategy, execution plan review, statistics maintenance, workload analysis, storage management, application data access pattern review, and proactive identification of performance and cloud cost improvement opportunities. • Partner with application development and product teams to review schema design, data modeling, entity ownership, data access patterns, application code impacts, Entity Framework Core usage, pagination strategy, GUID versus sequential ID usage, database changes, and production troubleshooting needs.• Define and maintain database development and maintenance standards for schema changes, naming conventions, indexing, Azure database maintenance patterns, backup and retention, rollback, deployment readiness, documentation, and database design review checkpoints. • Establish and improve monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability practices for database health, availability, storage growth, blocking, deadlocks, capacity trends, and operational risk. • Develop and validate backup, restore, disaster recovery, failover, high availability, security, encryption, data classification, access control, auditing, and compliance practices aligned to business availability, RPO, and RTO expectations. • Evaluate data architecture options and patterns including datastore selection, archiving, caching, non-SQL data storage, purge strategy, cold storage, multitenancy, tenant isolation, shared versus database-per-tenant models, partitioning, sharding, consistency, workload isolation, and the decision process for selecting the right datastore for a given need. • Review upcoming epics, SaaS initiatives, modernization plans, and product roadmap items to identify database implications early and translate improvement opportunities into actionable backlog items or PBIs or stories. • Identify and remediate technical debt, scaling risks, schema complexity, storage inefficiencies, production stability concerns, cloud cost drivers, and opportunities for performance improvement, schema simplification, Azure cloud cost optimization, and risk mitigation. • Participate in incident response, root cause analysis, post-incident improvement planning, architecture documentation, standards documentation, operational procedures, and recommended future-state improvements.
Required Qualifications: • Minimum of 8 years of experience as a Database Developer, Database Administrator, Cloud Database Administrator, Database Engineer, or similar role. • Hands-on experience administering and optimizing Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL Database environments. • Hands-on experience addressing non-functional requirements while delivering functional outcomes. • Hands-on experience collaborating with architects, leads, and delivery teams to develop and support end-to-end solution delivery.• Strong knowledge of SQL performance tuning, indexing, query optimization, execution plans, statistics, and database maintenance. • Experience supporting application development teams with schema design, data modeling, database change review, and production troubleshooting. • Familiarity with common application development languages and frameworks used in database-backed systems, including C#, .NET, and Entity Framework Core. • Working knowledge of backup, restore, disaster recovery, high availability, monitoring, alerting, and operational support practices. • Understanding database security, encryption, access management, auditing, and data protection practices. • Ability to document standards, communicate technical recommendations clearly, and collaborate across distributed teams.
Preferred Qualifications: • Experience with Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Monitor, Query Store, Performance Insights, Log Analytics, and related Azure database tooling; Azure SQL Managed Instance experience is helpful where applicable. • Experience with SaaS platforms, multi-tenant architectures, tenant isolation strategies, partitioning, sharding, and large-scale cloud database environments. • Familiarity with Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, database deployment automation, schema migration tools, and release management practices. • Knowledge of archiving, caching, non-SQL data storage patterns, data archival, purge strategies, and cloud cost optimization methods. • Microsoft Azure or SQL Server certifications are preferred. • Experience working with globally distributed application development and product teams.