Senior SQL Server Database Administrator

About Sourceability

Sourceability® is a global digital distributor specializing in electronic components, revolutionizing how modern enterprises launch products. We pride ourselves on innovation, quality, and efficient logistics, serving industries such as communications, consumer electronics, and automotive manufacturing.

Role Overview

We are establishing a new Global Engineering Organization (GEO) to enhance software delivery, production stability, and long-term engineering capabilities. We seek a Senior SQL Server DBA responsible for ensuring the reliability, performance, recoverability, and quality of Sourceability's SQL Server and data platform ecosystems. The position will focus on critical business systems with an emphasis on production stability, high availability, disaster recovery, backup procedures, performance tuning, schema review, and cross-team support.

This hands-on technical role within the Platform, DevOps & Data division involves close collaboration with software engineers, product leads, DevOps, infrastructure, security, QA, and business stakeholders to minimize database production risks and boost delivery reliability. While supporting data pipelines and reporting feeds is important, primary attention is on maintaining stable production databases and secure software delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage daily operations, reliability, performance, and recoverability of designated SQL Server environments.
• Support multiple environments including production, QA, UAT, staging, and development for critical applications.
• Maintain and enhance backup, restore, recovery validation, retention, and disaster recovery processes.
• Design and sustain high availability and disaster recovery strategies, such as AlwaysOn Availability Groups and replication, with focus on failover readiness and meeting RPO/RTO goals.
• Monitor database health, performance metrics, job executions, locking issues, replication status, and backup success.
• Troubleshoot performance bottlenecks including slow queries, indexing, statistics, locking, tempdb pressure, and resource conflicts.
• Review database schema changes, stored procedures, indexes, access patterns, and query architecture in partnership with software teams before production deploys.
• Collaborate with product leads and engineers to enhance database designs and access maintainability.
• Validate release readiness by reviewing database migration plans, rollback procedures, and deployment dependencies.
• Provide Level 2 and 3 support for database-related incidents, urgent defects, data integrity challenges, and production-impacting problems.
• Lead root cause analysis and implement actionable remediation for database incidents.
• Identify technical debt, vulnerabilities, fragile jobs, undocumented dependencies, and operational risks in database environments.
• Develop and maintain documentation on database architecture, maintenance tasks, backup/recovery protocols, HA/DR workflows, and troubleshooting guides.
• Support ETL/ELT processes, reporting feeds, and internal data platform functions without compromising production stability.
• Improve monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and operational visibility for databases and data platforms.
• Track and communicate DBA workload and progress through tools such as Azure DevOps.

Candidate Profile

• Minimum 5 years experience in DBA, database engineering, or data platform roles with hands-on production database management.
• Extensive expertise in Microsoft SQL Server performance tuning, query optimization, indexing, execution plans, and capacity planning.
• Proven experience in backup/restore processes, disaster recovery, and high availability implementations in mission-critical environments.
• Familiarity with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, replication, log shipping, clustering, or comparable HA/DR technologies.
• Strong incident management skills including production support, defect investigation, root cause analysis, and remediation.
• Experience reviewing schema changes, migrations, stored procedures, and data access strategies collaboratively with software teams.
• Comfortable coordinating with development, QA, DevOps, infrastructure, security, and business units during delivery and support.
• Thorough understanding of data integrity, security controls, permissions, and operational safeguards.
• Experience with ETL/ELT tools, SSIS, scheduled jobs, data exports, and integrations.
• Familiarity with project and change management tools like Azure DevOps, Jira, or Git.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving capabilities with structured troubleshooting approaches.
• Strong communication skills to convey technical and risk-related impacts to diverse stakeholders.
• High accountability, sound judgment, and decision-making under pressure.

Preferred Additional Expertise

• Experience with SQL Server Enterprise-level features such as Query Store, Extended Events, partitioning, backup compression, and performance monitoring tools.
• Knowledge of Windows Server environments, IIS backend applications, Active Directory access models, and Microsoft enterprise systems.
• Exposure to cloud database services (Azure SQL, Azure Managed Instance, AWS RDS for SQL Server).
• Familiarity with other databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB is advantageous but secondary.
• Experience with data pipeline orchestrators and integration tools (SSIS, Airflow, dbt, Azure Data Factory).
• Understanding of data warehousing, analytics platforms, Power BI integrations, operational data stores, and reporting architectures.
• Use of monitoring platforms such as Zabbix, Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, Datadog, and SQL Sentry.
• Background in electronic component distribution, supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or B2B e-commerce sectors.
• Knowledge of data governance, data quality, metadata, retention policies, privacy, and compliance as they relate to databases.
• Experience enhancing organizational database operational maturity, process development, ownership, and documentation.

Initial Expectations (First 90 Days)

• Gain comprehensive understanding of Sourceability's database landscapes, production systems, data flows, HA/DR designs, and existing processes.
• Build strong partnerships across DevOps, engineering, product teams, infrastructure, security, QA, delivery, and business stakeholders.
• Assess and improve backup, restore, and disaster recovery processes, including documentation and ownership models.
• Evaluate SQL Server HA/DR posture for failover preparedness and identify risk areas.
• Identify and prioritize database performance, stability, technical debts, and maintainability challenges.
• Enhance visibility and monitoring of database health, backups, job execution, and alerting mechanisms.
• Implement or enhance processes for database change control, release readiness, migration validation, and rollback strategies.
• Document critical operational procedures and escalation paths.
• Deliver at least one measurable database reliability or operational improvement.
• Outline a roadmap for ongoing improvements aligned with GEO priorities and engineering capacity.

Role Boundaries

This role does not handle business prioritization or requirements definition, which remain under Product/Delivery Managers and business leaders. It similarly does not own application architecture or infrastructure management but collaborates closely with those functions. It provides database readiness assessments and risk evaluations within release processes but does not independently approve deployments. The role prioritizes production database reliability over analytics-only platform activities.

Benefits

• Competitive remuneration package
• Continuous learning and professional growth opportunities
• Engagement in a collaborative global work environment
• Paid time off (PTO)

Equal Opportunity

We are committed to equal employment opportunity and prohibit discrimination on any legally protected basis including but not limited to race, gender, disability, age, veteran status, and more.