Senior Database Performance Engineer

Salary: $100,000 - 170,000 per year Requirements:

• We need at least 7 years of experience administering and tuning Microsoft SQL Server in demanding production environments.
• We are looking for expert-level execution-plan analysis and query rewriting skills, with strong knowledge of SARGability, set-based design, and parameter-sniffing mitigation.
• We expect hands-on expertise with wait statistics, Query Store, Extended Events, Tempdb internals, and parallelism tuning.
• We require experience designing monitoring and alerting using SQL Server native tools or enterprise monitoring platforms.
• We require experience with SQL Availability Groups; experience with SQL Replication is preferred.
• We are looking for a proven record in incident management and root-cause analysis.
• We need strong proficiency in T-SQL and automation scripting.
• We require a reliable high-speed internet connection for remote work, using cable or fiber only with Ethernet access and meeting the stated bandwidth levels.

• We will rely on you to stand up and manage our monitoring platform using Query Store, wait statistics, file I/O baselines, custom Extended Events sessions, and performance dashboards.
• We expect you to define, refine, and maintain alerting based on workload-specific baselines so our notifications are trustworthy and actionable.
• You will establish normal behavior by workload and time of day, then alert on statistically meaningful deviations rather than fixed thresholds.
• You will lead incident triage across our database environment.
• You will own post-incident root-cause reviews and drive issues to permanent resolution.
• You will author and maintain operational runbooks and support a dependable on-call response process.
• You will diagnose and resolve top resource-consuming and lock-holding queries using Query Store, procedure statistics, and execution plan analysis.
• You will identify and fix CPU pressure, Tempdb contention, memory-grant waits, and I/O bottlenecks using wait statistics and DMVs.
• You will refactor and strengthen high-impact stored procedures and queries to improve concurrency and reduce contention.
• You will own index strategy, including usage analysis, fragmentation maintenance standards, and careful review of missing-index recommendations.
• You will configure Automatic Plan Correction and act promptly on tuning guidance.
• You will own core production operations, including backups, recovery, patching, high availability, capacity planning, and the security baseline.
• You will coordinate broader database initiatives across engineering and reporting teams and provide status and risk updates directly to our CIO.
• You will serve as the deep technical reviewer for the highest-risk queries before they reach production.
• You will partner with compliance teams to ensure auditability, retention, and strict access controls for sensitive customer and nonpublic personal information.

• Ethernet
• Incident Management
• Support
• SQL
• Security

More:

We are a mid-size financial services company investing heavily in the long-term stability, transparency, performance, and scalability of our Microsoft SQL Server data platform. This is a senior, hands-on role for an engineer who will act as the technical center of gravity for the database estate, combining observability, incident response, and performance engineering. The annual compensation is estimated at $100,000 to $170,000, and our benefits include a 401(k), dental, disability, health, vision, and life insurance, paid time off, 12 paid holidays, paid training, employee discounts, referral program, and referral bonuses. We are an equal opportunity employer.

last updated 33 week of 2026