Senior SQL Server Database Administrator (DBA)

Job Description

• A major South African financial services group that provides direct-marketed insurance, investment, and value-added solutions is seeking a Senior SQL Server DBA who will be responsible for the performance, security, availability, and disaster readiness of critical SQL Server database platforms across the enterprise.

Responsibilities

• Manage the full lifecycle of SQL Server instances installations, patching, configurations, upgrades across Dev, UAT, and production environments.
• Monitor overall database health, capacity, storage, and agent jobs to proactively resolve production incidents and performance degradation.
• Maintain complete operational documentation, including runbooks, inventories, and change control records.
• Participate in scheduled maintenance windows, release deployments, and on-call support rotations.
• Architect, configure, and maintain Always On Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances FCI, log shipping, and replication.
• Perform regular DR drills, failover tests, and recovery validations to meet strict Business RPO and RTO objectives.
• Ensure end-to-end synchronization and alignment of DB configurations, logins, permissions, and certificates across primary and DR sites.
• Design and execute enterprise backup and retention strategies Full, Diff, Log using native tools and third-party solutions e.g., Veeam.
• Conduct random and scheduled restore testing to validate point-in-time recovery capabilities and backup integrity.
• Proactively monitor backup health and rapidly resolve VSS, storage, or job failures.
• Collaborate with developers to review execution plans, optimize T-SQL code, refine indexes, and tune stored procedures.
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks related to blocking, deadlocks, wait stats, tempdb pressure, memory/CPU constraints, and parameter sniffing.
• Enforce database design standards that maximize scalability, maintainability, and code efficiency.
• Design, automate, and maintain table partitioning strategies partition functions, schemes, aligned indexes, and switching for high-growth data.
• Manage data lifecycles by defining retention, compression, archiving, and purging workflows in partnership with business stakeholders.
• Enforce strict RBAC, least-privilege access, and authentication mechanisms aligned with financial regulatory requirements.
• Manage Transparent Data Encryption TDE, backup encryption, SSL/TLS certificates, and master key lifecycle management.
• Lead database auditing, vulnerability remediation, security reviews, and evidence gathering for compliance audits.
• Develop PowerShell and T-SQL scripts to automate recurring health checks, capacity reporting, maintenance tasks, and job monitoring.
• Streamline manual administrative workloads to drive operational consistency and platform stability.
• Support future cloud readiness by assessing, migrating, and optimizing workloads for Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure VMs.
• Troubleshoot hybrid database environments, including private networking, connectivity, and identity integrations.
• Establish and enforce enterprise SQL Server standards for deployments, backups, security, and HA/DR.
• Mentor junior team members and transfer technical knowledge to elevate overall infrastructure capability.

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of dedicated Microsoft SQL Server administration experience in enterprise production environments.
• Deep Technical Expertise: Expert knowledge of T-SQL, execution plan analysis, index strategies, and native troubleshooting tools.
• HA/DR Mastery: Proven experience designing and managing Always On AGs, Failover Clusters, log shipping, and replication.
• Security & Encryption: Hands-on experience with TDE, certificate/key management, RBAC, and security hardening.
• Large Database Support: Practical experience with partitioning, archiving, and managing high-growth tables.
• Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to act as an escalation point for developers and leadership.

Preferred Certifications

• Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate or equivalent SQL Server legacy certification.
• Relevant Azure Administrator / Azure Solutions Architect certifications.
• ITIL Foundation.

Nice to Have

• Domain Experience: Background in financial services, insurance, or highly regulated environments.
• Cloud & Hybrid: Direct experience with Azure SQL ecosystem Managed Instance, IaaS, DB and hybrid networking.
• Tools & Scripting: Strong PowerShell automation skills and experience with enterprise backup software e.g., Veeam.
• Infrastructure Knowledge: Understanding of SAN storage, VMware virtualization, Active Directory, and Windows Server internals.