Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer - Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, AWS

Strider
Strider

Software Engineering

Barbados · Mexico · Dominica · Dominican Republic · Haiti · Jamaica · South America · Central America · Cuba · Antigua and Barbuda · The Bahamas · Belize · Guyana · Grenada · St Kitts & Nevis · St Vincent and the Grenadines · Suriname · St Lucia · Trinidad and Tobago · Remote

Posted on Sep 19, 2026

Requirements

Must-haves

  • 7+ years of professional experience
  • Deep and current Microsoft SQL Server administration
  • Hands-on experience with SQL Server installation and configuration on a self-managed server (EC2 or on-premise), including OS-level work beneath a live production instance
  • Experience with Windows Server administration, including OS upgrades and migrations
  • Recently performed SQL Server upgrade, including source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, and the Windows Server version pairing
  • Experience with SQL Server high availability (Always On Availability Groups, failover clustering)
  • Experience with MySQL administration
  • Experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch)
  • Proficiency with AI tools (e.g., Claude) applied to daily work
  • Prior end-to-end ownership of a production database estate, including assessing an
  • inherited environment and driving it to a measurably better state
  • Experience setting data standards and reviewing schema and data-access design
  • across application teams
  • Strong communication skills in both spoken and written English

What makes you stand out

  • Most recent SQL Server upgrade performed, stated on the profile: source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, year, and the Windows Server version pairing
  1. Why this role exists:
  • This position reports into the Platform team and serves as the top technical authority on data for both engineering groups
  • The pressing need is someone able to jump straight into a time-sensitive OS upgrade ahead of year-end
  • The broader mandate is bringing the estate to a standard that holds up with customers, auditors, and the insurer
  • The company was formed through a merger and runs two separate stacks, with no single owner accountable for the estate to date
  • We're looking for someone motivated to solve this at the root rather than apply a temporary fix, with the mandate to do so

Nice-to-haves

  • Startup experience
  • Snowflake administration and development
  • ETL pipelines and tools (e.g., Rivery, dbt)
  • Data warehouse design and development
  • Data lake on S3
  • BI/analytics tools (e.g., Metabase, QuickSight)
  • Data governance and data quality practice
  • SQL Server migration to a managed service
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent

What you will work on

  • Own the database and data estate end to end: assess what we have, run a time-critical upgrade as the first job, and then set the direction and standards that mature the whole environment
  • The company is the product of a merger, so we run two stacks — C#/.NET on Microsoft SQL Server, and TypeScript/JavaScript on MySQL — both in AWS
  • Our SQL Server is BYOL on EC2: we install, configure, and operate it ourselves, an on-premise setup that happens to live in AWS. MySQL runs on RDS
  • First 90 days
  • 1. Assess the current estate: inventory, backup and recovery posture, high availability configuration, monitoring and alerting gaps, access model, capacity, and cost.
  • 2. Produce a written state-of-the-estate and a prioritized remediation plan
  • Near-term priority
  • 1. Upgrade the Windows Server OS hosting our production SQL Server estate — Windows
  • Server 2016 → 2022 — across an Always On Availability Group cluster, with no data loss and
  • minimal downtime. Must do before the end of 2026
  • 2. Then upgrade the SQL Server version from our current SQL Server 2017, and own the recommendation on whether we stay self-managed on EC2 or move to AWS RDS managed SQL Server after the upgrade.
  • Core ownership
  • 1. Full ownership of administration, operation,s and optimization for all relational databases: SQL Server (self-managed on EC2) and MySQL (RDS)
  • 2. Performance tuning, monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery, high availability and failover, security and access management, capacity and cost
  • Maturing the estate
  • 1. Define and enforce database standards across the C#/.NET SQL Server and TypeScript/MySQL codebases; act as the technical authority on schema and data-
  • access design for both engineering teams
  • 2. Own data observability: monitoring, alerting, and capacity forecasting against agreed service levels
  • 3. Establish backup and DR testing, access governan,ce and change control that stand up to SOC 2 and our cyber insurer
  • 4. Produce and maintain a data platform roadmap covering both relational stacks, Snowfl,ake and the analytics estate
  • 5. Set direction for the data engineering team on database matters
  • Secondary
  • 1. Snowflake administration, including usage and cost monitoring
  • 2. Database development — stored procedures, schema design, query optimization
  • 3. Data warehouse and data engineering work alongside the data platform team; support internal and external analytics and BI
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