Tech Specialist - SQL Administrator

Salary Package: £45,000 - £52,000 plus large company benefits, a broad flexible benefits scheme, and 2 paid-for volunteering days a year

Role: Tech Specialist - SQL Administrator

As a SQL Server DBA, you will provide technical expertise in delivering, supporting and continuously improving SCC's enterprise SQL Server DBA services supporting business-critical applications for its customers.

Working closely with Infrastructure, Application, Security and Project teams, you will own the end-to-end support around health, performance, security, and availability of critical database platforms, while contributing to modernisation, automation and operational excellence initiatives.

• Own the architecture, tuning, performance, and support strategy for enterprise MS SQL Server infrastructure, on-premises and in the cloud (Azure SQL Database/Managed Instance, SQL Server on Azure)
• Lead the technical resolution of complex SQL Server incidents, service requests and problem investigations, ensuring effective root cause analysis and permanent resolution.
• Lead SQL Server lifecycle activities, including implementation, configuration, upgrades, patching, migrations, maintenance and decommissioning.
• Lead and/or ACTIVELY PARTICIPATE in IT and cloud migration projects across analysis, design, testing, environment preparation, cutover, and change impact analysis
• Lead cloud migration and modernization initiatives - assessing, planning, and executing lift-and-shift, re-platforming, or re-architecting of SQL Server workloads to Azure
• Ensure SQL Server platforms consistently meet agreed service levels for availability, resilience, performance, recoverability and security.
• Design, implement and continuously improve SQL Server high availability, disaster recovery, replication and database security solutions.
• Drive automation, standardisation and operational excellence across SQL Server services.
• Define, maintain, and continuously improve SQL Server standards, operational procedures and technical documentation.
• Design, review, and continuously improve daily/weekly/monthly health check frameworks, proactive monitoring, and alerting across on-prem and cloud-hosted databases
• Collaborate with Infrastructure, Backup, Monitoring, Application, Security and Project teams to deliver scalable, resilient and secure SQL Server services.

Location: Birmingham (likely to be remote) (SCC operate hybrid working, which comprises of a mix of office and home working)

Contract Type: Permanent

Hours: 9.00 am - 5.30 pm Monday - Friday

• Advanced, hands-on DBA expertise across multiple versions of SQL Server technologies including installation, configuration, and administration
• Expert knowledge of SQL Server architecture, administration and troubleshooting.
• Deep understanding of SQL Server architecture, internals, and query execution / optimisation
• Proven experience administering and supporting cloud-hosted SQL platforms: Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and/or AWS RDS/EC2 for SQL Server
• Strong expertise across SQL Server high availability, disaster recovery, database security and replication technologies.
• Excellent analytical, troubleshooting and performance tuning skills, including execution plan analysis, indexing strategy and wait statistics.
• Experience working within ITIL-based service management environments.
• Strong communication, stakeholder management and technical documentation skills.
• Strong analytical, structured, and methodical approach to complex, ambiguous problems, including major incident and root-cause analysis
• Demonstrated commitment to Quality Standards, security best practice, and continuous improvement
• Commitment to continuous improvement, operational excellence and customer-focused service delivery.