Senior SQL DBA / Data Platform Engineer | Hybrid (Budapest)
Via agency · MRL Consulting Group
Database administratorSystem administratorFlexibleFull-timeBudapest
We are looking for a Senior SQL DBA / Data Platform Engineer to take ownership of the reliability, performance, and operational stability of a set of business-critical database and data platform environments. This is a hands-on engineering role focused primarily on Microsoft SQL Server environments supporting production applications and operational systems.
Tasks
- Own the day-to-day operation, stability, performance, and recoverability of SQL Server database environments
- Support production, QA, UAT, staging, and development database systems used by business-critical applications
- Manage and improve backup, restore, recovery validation, retention, and disaster recovery processes
- Support high availability and disaster recovery configurations including replication, failover, and recovery readiness (where applicable)
- Monitor database health including performance, storage, jobs, blocking, deadlocks, replication, and backup status
- Diagnose and resolve performance issues such as slow queries, execution plan problems, indexing inefficiencies, locking, and resource contention
- Review schema changes, stored procedures, indexing strategies, and data access patterns with engineering teams
- Collaborate with engineers and architects to improve database design, stability, and maintainability
- Support release readiness by validating database scripts, migrations, rollback plans, and deployment dependencies
- Participate in production incident response for database-related issues and business-impacting defects
- Lead or contribute to root cause analysis and long-term remediation of database incidents
- Identify database technical debt, fragile processes, undocumented dependencies, and operational risks
- Maintain practical documentation for database architecture, backup/restore procedures, HA/DR processes, and operational runbooks
- Support ETL, data feeds, reporting extracts, integrations, and operational data flows while protecting production stability
- Improve monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, and visibility across database environments
- Ensure database-related work is tracked and coordinated through agreed delivery and change management tool
Requirements
- Experience as a DBA, database engineer, or data platform engineer in production environments
- Strong hands-on experience with Microsoft SQL Server
- Deep understanding of SQL Server performance tuning, execution plans, indexing, statistics, query optimisation, locking, blocking, and capacity planning
- Experience with backup, restore, disaster recovery, and recovery testing in production environments
- Experience with high availability concepts such as AlwaysOn Availability Groups, replication, clustering, or log shipping
- Proven experience supporting production incidents, defect analysis, and root cause investigations
- Ability to work closely with software engineers on schema design, migrations, and query performance
- Experience working across engineering, DevOps, infrastructure, QA, product, and business teams
- Strong understanding of database security, access control, permissions, and operational governance
- Experience supporting ETL/ELT, scheduled jobs, data exports, or integration pipelines
- Familiarity with delivery tools such as Azure DevOps, Jira, Git, or similar systems
- Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills with a structured approach to problem solving
- Clear communicator with ability to explain technical risk, performance impact, and remediation options
- Strong ownership mindset and ability to make sound operational decisions under pressure