Database SME & Performance Engineer

Key Responsibilities Database Development &SQL Engineering Design, develop, test, and maintain complex stored procedures, functions, views, triggers, and other database objects. Write efficient, maintainable SQL and fine-tune existing queries for performance, scalability, and correctness. Analyze query execution plans and optimize joins, filters, aggregations, indexing, statistics, and data-access patterns. Apply strong knowledge of SQL fundamentals, transactions, locking, concurrency, data types, constraints, and relational database concepts. Review database code submitted by developers and provide specific recommendations before production deployment. Database Performance Engineering Establish database performance baselines and monitor key parameters including CPU, memory, I/O, connections, waits, locks, blocking, deadlocks, query duration, throughput, and storage growth. Identify performance bottlenecks and implement corrective actions through query tuning, indexing, schema improvements, workload optimization, and configuration changes. Review and adjust database configuration parameters according to the database platform, workload characteristics, application usage, and operational requirements. Optimize table structures, partitioning approaches, indexing strategies, statistics management, and data-purging mechanisms. Validate performance improvements through repeatable testing, measurement, and documentation. Database Subject Matter Expertise & Governance Serve as the Database SME for PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server, providing guidance on database design, performance, configuration, scalability, and reliability. Define and enforce database development standards, including schema design, naming conventions, indexing, constraints, query design, and release-readiness criteria. Act as the mandatory technical reviewer for database-related changes and participate in architecture and design discussions involving the data layer. Maintain performance-tuning guidelines, troubleshooting playbooks, operational runbooks, known-error documentation, and recovery procedures. Provide coaching and technical guidance to developers and support teams on database engineering best practices. Proactive Monitoring & Issue Prevention Partner with DBAs and monitoring teams to implement alerts, automated health checks, diagnostic logging, and early-warning mechanisms. Identify recurring risks and establish preventive controls to reduce performance degradation, capacity issues, blocking, failed jobs, and data-related incidents. Set up and monitor database jobs and automated maintenance activities such as indexing, vacuuming, statistics updates, consistency checks, and purging. Conduct periodic database health assessments and recommend improvements to capacity, stability, resilience, and operational readiness. Troubleshooting, War-Room & Incident Management Lead the technical diagnosis of complex database incidents affecting application performance, stability, availability, or data integrity. Participate actively in critical incident war rooms and work under pressure with application, infrastructure, product, and DBA teams to restore services. Troubleshoot slow queries, blocking, deadlocks, connection exhaustion, high resource utilization, disk latency, failed jobs, transaction issues, and database contention. Perform or support root cause analysis, document technical findings, and implement permanent corrective and preventive actions. Communicate incident status, technical findings, risks, and recommended actions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Data Recovery, Availability & Operational Reliability Work with DBAs to define, validate, and improve backup, restore, recovery, replication, high-availability, and disaster-recovery mechanisms. Provide technical support during data recovery, database restoration, failover, corruption investigation, and service-restoration scenarios. Participate in recovery testing and ensure that procedures, dependencies, responsibilities, and escalation paths are documented. Validate database health and application performance after recovery, failover, maintenance, or configuration changes. Role Scope & Collaboration This is a hands-on database engineering and performance role, not a purely administrative or coordination position. The role owns database development quality, stored-procedure engineering, SQL optimization, performance analysis, troubleshooting, and database technical standards within the Development organization. The role works closely with the Tech Services DBAs on production access, server-level changes, backup and recovery, high availability, security, and infrastructure matters. The role collaborates with developers, architects, product teams, support teams, infrastructure teams, and monitoring teams to improve database reliability and prevent recurring issues. Required Skills & Experience 8+ years of hands-on experience in database engineering, database development, performance tuning, or database administration, with strong expertise in PostgreSQL and/or MS SQL Server. Expert-level SQL skills with extensive experience writing and optimizing complex stored procedures, functions, views, triggers, and queries. Strong knowledge of SQL fundamentals and database performance parameters, including execution plans, indexing, statistics, transactions, locking, blocking, deadlocks, concurrency, memory, CPU, storage I/O, waits, and connection management. Proven experience in query optimization, query fine-tuning, workload analysis, database configuration, and performance troubleshooting. Hands-on experience diagnosing and resolving database-related production incidents in war-room environments. Experience with data recovery, backup and restore, replication, high availability, disaster recovery, and post-recovery validation. Experience implementing database monitoring, alerting, health checks, automated maintenance, and preventive controls. Ability to translate complex database findings into practical recommendations for developers, DBAs, architects, and business stakeholders. Strong understanding of application-to-database interaction patterns and the performance impact of application design decisions. Ability to work independently, take ownership of critical issues, and drive them through diagnosis, resolution, and prevention. Nice to Have Experience with cloud-managed databases such as Azure SQL, AWS RDS, or Google Cloud SQL. Experience with NoSQL, graph, or vector databases such as MongoDB, Redis, Neo4j, AllegroGraph, Pinecone, or pgvector. Familiarity with database observability, application performance monitoring, and workload-analysis tools. Experience using automation or AI-assisted tools for query analysis, anomaly detection, documentation, or root cause investigation. Relevant Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Database, or PostgreSQL certifications.