Senior Database Engineer - SQL Server / Azure / AI

Still babysitting backups and manually checking query plans? It's time to level up.

If your day-to-day is bogged down by routine tickets and manual maintenance plans, you're operating in the rear-view mirror. Inside one of Australia's premier Big 4 financial institutions, we have decoupled operational run from engineering innovation.

With dedicated offshore L2 teams managing the day-to-day operational noise, our L3 Database Engineers don't babysit databases-they design intelligent, automated, and self-healing data ecosystems at true tier-1 scale.

We are hunting for a forward-thinking Database Engineer ready to trade traditional DBA tasks for high-impact systems engineering: large-scale automation, golden-signal telemetry, and enterprise AI adoption.

The Scale & The Mission

You'll be working across a mission-critical fleet of 4,000+ database instances, supporting millions of daily transactions in an environment where milliseconds matter. At this magnitude, manual work is obsolete.

• Enterprise AI in Action: Inject AI connectors, prompt engineering, and LLMs directly into operational workflows-summarizing thousands of capacity reports and accelerating root-cause analysis in seconds.

• Proactive SRE & Golden Signals: Shift away from static alerts. Profile application baselines and track golden signals (latency, traffic, saturation, error budgets) to neutralize performance drift before it ever impacts customers.

• Process Re-Engineering: Standardize database delivery against modern CI/CD and DevOps standards, leveraging infrastructure-as-code and scripting to replace repetitive operational overhead.

• High-Tier Problem Solving: No trivial tickets. You are the definitive escalation point, stepping in only for complex P1 incidents and high-tier architectural decisions (averaging 1 call per month).

• Multi-Engine Ecosystem: SQL Server (On-Prem and Azure SQL Managed Instance) anchors 85% of the footprint, with seamless pathways into PostgreSQL, Oracle, Teradata, and modern open-source engines.

Who You Are

We care about how you think, automate, and solve problems-not how well you recite textbook syntax.

• The Foundation: Deep, authoritative mastery of Microsoft SQL Server across enterprise on-premises estates and modern cloud environments (Azure SQL MI).

• The Engineer's Mindset: Hands-on automation chops (PowerShell, Python, Ansible, or advanced T-SQL scripting) paired with an understanding of modern DevOps principles.

• AI & Future-Tech Curiosity: A practical, forward-looking attitude toward emerging tools-whether that's leveraging enterprise Copilot, automated prompt pipelines, or modern observability tooling to multiply productivity.

• Analytical Observability: Comfort with historical trend analysis, application profiling, and preventative reliability engineering over reactive troubleshooting.

• Adaptive Outlook comfortable stepping outside a single engine to touch open-source technologies (PostgreSQL, NoSQL) even world defines Not sure.

What's on the Table

• Top-of-Market Engineering Rates: A financial services package restructured specifically to reward high-tier engineering over conventional DBA run-rates.

• Genuine Flexibility: A true 50/50 hybrid model (5 days per fortnight at the Kogarah campus) with flexible daily start and finish times to fit your life.

• Protected Engineering Time: Offshore teams absorb routine triage, giving you the runway to build, optimize, and deliver meaningful initiatives.

• Immense Career Runway: Work within a vast Platform Hosting ecosystem where cross-skilling into cloud platforms, open-source database architectures, and site reliability engineering is actively backed by leadership.