SQL Server DBA

Role: SQL Server DBA


Location: Dallas, TX


Type: Contract

Summary :


Client is looking for a senior SQL DBA - Not necessarily required to do development work but needs a very solid experienced DBA who can focus on doing heavy admin, tuning, and cleanup work on the SQL DB that sits behind their Retail System ( Yellow Dog).

They will have to have excellent communication skills and business acumen - and will be expected to consult and collaborate effectively and intelligently communicate and interpret requirements across multiple stakeholders (including individual contributors and executive leaders) across various BUs (Retail & Hotel Ops, Finance etc.) and ensure the DB is conditioned to support multiple business and reporting needs. They need help providing day to day support to the SQLDB and will also be expected to identify where there are data gaps, make recommendations for improvements. and improve documentation of their architecture and data flow and advise Gustaaf and various stakeholders on how to better stabilize and scale the system.

Reason for Opening:


The IT team is required to support centralized reporting for thinks like inventory, revenue allocation, shrink, reorder point calculations, etc. and needs to address challenges with database performance, data quality, and stability, which impacts retail / hotel / restaurant operations, field/hotel-level inventory accuracy, and financial integrity.


Currently, they have an overextended internal team, leaving retail systems unsupported, so Gustaaf Schrils ( CIO ) is looking for a SQL DBA dedicated to their Retail System ( Yellow Dog ) to address performance / stability issues (i.e. Slow queries, Poor indexing, Bloated tables, Fragmentation, Deadlocks etc); and sync issues between POS Yellow Dog ERP ( Oracle EBS ) which are creating reporting delays which adversely impact speed of business decisions.

• Omni frequently updates/expands operations through M&A or multi-property rollouts- and has to often scale retail DBs across properties which requires strong SQL oversight
• Inventory accuracy is suffering and audits, shrink management, and compliance which can result in poor retail inventory data and can also result in reconciliation problems, financial discrepancies, can create lost revenue so needs a SQL DBA to ensure the DB underneath Yellow Dog cleaned, deduped, reconciled, and better structured or retail teams cannot trust inventory counts.

About the Company:

Client is a large hospitality operator / Hotel Company with :
• Hotel retail outlets (gift shops, spas, golf shops, food retail, boutiques).
• Distributed retail systems across 50+ properties.
• Multi-property POS ecosystem integrating with:

• • PMS) Property Management Systems like (for example: Opera, StayNTouch, Light-speed)
  • Retail POS systems ( Yellow Dog - hospitality / retail tool whichintegrates with property and POS systems and is used to manages inventory across many outlets and runs on Microsoft SQL Server back-end-and needs ongoing maintenance because it stores large volumes of transacted, item-level, multi-location retail data)
  • Financial ERP (Oracle EBS)

Fundamental Requirements:

• Core SQL Server / DBA Skills:
  • SQL Server 2016-2022 administration
  • Query tuning, indexing, and performance optimization
  • Database maintenance (DBCC checks, index rebuilds, shrink/cleanup strategies)
  • Backup/restore + HA/DR
  • SQL Security & Role-Based Access Control
  • Understanding of SQL Agent jobs and ETL schedules
  • Familiarity with integrations:
    • API feeds
    • Scheduled batch imports
    • File-based ingest
    • Sync issues between systems
• Experience with large transactional databases (retail /hospitality requires heavy item-level transactions
• Ability to understand and correlate Hospitality + Retail + Multi-Property Ops Context :
  • Retail outlets operate 7 days a week → uptime critical
  • Hotel PMS + POS integration complexity
  • Distributed systems across 50+ hotels (WAN latency, local servers, replication)
  • Seasonality spikes (holidays, events) impacting performance
  • Inventory shrink + financial reconciliation processes

Desired Skills/ Experience:

• Retail System-Specific Technical Skills are desired (i.e.. - Understanding of things like):
  • Inventory adjustments
  • Retail/Field-level vs centralized inventory
  • Purchase orders
  • Receiving processes
  • Price books
  • SKU structures
  • Ability to interpret POS (Point-of-Sale) data structures
• Experience with inventory systems or retail ERP
  • Yellow Dog is a plus (not required if strong SQL + inventory background)

Tools/Technologies :

• SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
• SQL Profiler, Extended Events
• SQL monitoring (RedGate or SolarWinds)
• Power BI or Tableau (for data quality dashboards)
• Windows Server & Active Directory basics
• ETL tools (SSIS likely)
• Git or version control (light usage for scripts)
• Yellow Dog APIs / integration layer (desired but not required)

Business / Soft Skills Needed:

Because the CIO emphasized "solid business acumen," this is NOT just a backend DBA.

They need someone who can:

• Talk to Retail / Restaurant/ Hotel operations managers
• Explain data errors to non-technical teams
  • Understand why bad inventory data = lost revenue
• Document and recommend operational improvements
• Work cross-functionally with:
  • Finance
  • Retail GM/Directors
  • Store managers
  • Omni corporate IT
• Translate root causes into business impact
  • Example: "SKU duplication is causing margin calculation errors ")

Daily Activities

• Monitor SQL Server database health:
  • Review slow queries, blocking, deadlocks
  • Manage backups, restores, and failover preparedness:
  • Validate data feeds from POS →
  • Yellow Dog → downstream systems
  • Fix data hygiene issues:
    • orphaned records
    • mismatched SKUs
    • duplicate items
    • incorrect unit conversion
    • Analyze data anomalies impacting retail operations
• Work with retail operations and finance to understand data gaps
• Document DB architecture and data flow
• Provide guidance on how to stabilize and scale the system

Project Work:

• Index tuning & rebuilding
• Migrating SQL instances or consolidating servers
• Hardening SQL Server security
• Improving disaster recovery and backup strategy
• Building monitoring dashboards
• Working with Yellow Dog vendor support
• Supporting new store openings or rollouts
• Helping prepare for PCI or SOX compliance (retail touches payments → high compliance needs)