Senior Sql Database Administrator

Job Title: Senior SQL Server DBA

Location: Amsterdam or Munich

Employment Type: Full-time

About our client

Our client is a global distributor of electronic components. They develop cutting-edge digital tools for the market. To support their rapid growth and global expansion, they hiring in EMEA.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Senior SQL Server DBA to own and continuously improve the reliability, performance, recoverability, and operational quality of database and data platform environments. This is a hands-on technical role within the Platform, DevOps & Data function, focusing primarily on SQL Server-backed business-critical systems.

Your first priority will be ensuring the reliable operation of current production databases and providing safe, structured support for software delivery. You will work closely with Software Engineering, Product Group Team Leads, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Security to mitigate database-related production risks and improve delivery reliability.

Responsibilities

• Production Ownership & Health: Own the day-to-day technical operations, reliability, performance, and recoverability of production, QA, UAT, staging, and development database environments.
• High Availability & Disaster Recovery: Maintain and improve backup, restore, recovery validation, and disaster recovery procedures. Support HA/DR designs, including SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, replication, clustering, and failover readiness to meet defined RPO/RTO expectations.
• Performance Tuning: Diagnose and resolve database performance bottlenecks, including slow queries, execution plans, indexing, statistics, locking, blocking, tempdb pressure, and resource contention.
• Monitoring & Alerting: Monitor database health, storage, jobs, and replication. Continuously improve monitoring tools, alerting mechanisms, capacity planning, and operational visibility.
• Release Readiness & Schema Review: Collaborate with software engineering teams to review schema changes, stored procedures, indexes, data access patterns, and database migration scripts prior to production deployment.
• Incident Management: Participate in L2/L3 escalations for database production issues, urgent defects, data integrity concerns, and business-impacting incidents. Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and implement practical remediation.
• Data Integration Support: Support ETL/ELT pipelines, scheduled jobs, reporting data feeds, analytics extracts, and internal data platform needs while ensuring production database stability is never compromised.
• Documentation & Best Practices: Create and maintain comprehensive documentation for database architecture, maintenance jobs, recovery procedures, HA/DR runbooks, and operational workflows.

Required Qualifications (Must-Haves)

• Location & Presence: Must be based in the EMEA, with the ability to work in Munich or Amsterdam
• Experience: 5+ years of experience as a DBA, Database Engineer, Data Platform Engineer, or a similar hands-on production database role.
• Database Expertise: Strong hands-on experience managing Microsoft SQL Server in business-critical production environments.
• Performance Tuning: Deep understanding of SQL Server performance tuning, execution plans, query optimization, indexing strategies, statistics, and blocking/deadlock analysis.
• HA/DR: Solid experience with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, log shipping, replication, clustering, and disaster recovery execution.
• Collaborative Delivery: Proven ability to review database migrations, schema designs, and query patterns alongside software development, QA, and DevOps teams.
• Data Pipelines: Practical experience with ETL/ELT processes, SSIS, scheduled SQL Agent jobs, data exports, and integration workflows.
• Tools: Experience using Azure DevOps, Jira, Git, or similar tools for work tracking, change reviews, and documentation.
• Mindset: A high-ownership mindset with strong analytical, troubleshooting, and communication skills to clearly explain technical database risks and recovery options to stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience with SQL Server Enterprise features, such as Query Store, Extended Events, partitioning, backup compression, and advanced SQL performance monitoring tools (e.g., SQL Sentry, Redgate).
• Familiarity with Windows Server, IIS-backed applications, and Active Directory-integrated access models.
• Experience with cloud-hosted database solutions (e.g., Azure SQL, Azure SQL Managed Instance, AWS RDS for SQL Server).
• Familiarity with alternative database engines (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB).
• Familiarity with modern data pipeline and analytics tools (e.g., Airflow, dbt, Azure Data Factory, Power BI).
• Experience using enterprise monitoring systems (e.g., Zabbix, Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, SolarWinds).
• Experience working in B2B sectors such as electronic components, supply chain, logistics, distribution, or e-commerce.