Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer ( US Based Company )

Alternative Title: Principal Database Engineer – DBA & Data Engineering

Experience: 10+ years

Role Overview

We are looking for a highly skilled Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer who combines deep Database Administration expertise with strong development and data engineering capabilities.

This role will own the operational health, performance, reliability, and scalability of databases across our customer environments while also supporting engineering teams with database design, query optimization, performance tuning, data migrations, automation, and customer onboarding.

Unlike a traditional DBA position, this role requires strong programming and engineering skills. The successful candidate should be capable of diagnosing database problems at infrastructure level while also understanding application behavior, query patterns, data pipelines, APIs, and deployment processes.

This combination will allow the individual to support production database operations as well as participate directly in customer onboarding, data migration, integration, and performance engineering.

Key Responsibilities

Database Administration

- Manage production databases across multiple customer environments.
- Own database availability, performance, reliability, security, backups, and recoverability.
- Monitor database health and proactively identify capacity and performance issues.
- Design and maintain backup, restore, disaster recovery, and point-in-time recovery strategies.
- Manage database maintenance including index management, statistics, integrity checks, and storage optimization.
- Perform database upgrades, patching, migration, and configuration management.
- Manage database permissions and security.
- Support database compliance and audit requirements.
- Participate in database incident response and root-cause analysis.

Performance Engineering

- Perform advanced SQL performance tuning.
- Analyze execution plans and identify inefficient queries.
- Troubleshoot blocking, deadlocks, waits, locking, memory pressure, CPU pressure, and I/O bottlenecks.
- Optimize indexes, queries, stored procedures, and database schemas.
- Work with application developers to identify ORM and application-level database performance problems.
- Review database-intensive application features before production release.
- Build database performance baselines and capacity models.
- Identify slow or inefficient workloads across multiple customer databases.

Data Engineering & Development

- Develop SQL scripts, stored procedures, automation utilities, and data processing workflows.
- Support ETL/ELT pipelines.
- Develop automation using Python, PowerShell, C#, or equivalent languages.
- Work with data engineers on ingestion and transformation pipelines.
- Support CDC and data replication architectures.
- Participate in database schema design and development.
- Design reliable and repeatable database deployment mechanisms.
- Build tooling for health checks, monitoring, migration, validation,



and reconciliation.

Customer Onboarding

- Participate directly in onboarding new customers.
- Analyze customer database structures and source systems.
- Support initial data extraction, migration, transformation, and validation.
- Diagnose customer-specific database performance and compatibility issues.
- Build reusable onboarding and migration automation.
- Validate database configurations before production cutover.
- Work with implementation, application, data, and customer teams throughout onboarding.
- Assist with large-volume data migrations and production go-live activities.

Required Technical Expertise

- 10+ years of database engineering / DBA experience.
- Expert-level knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server.
- Strong experience with Azure SQL Database and cloud-hosted database environments.
- Strong T-SQL development skills.
- Expert knowledge of execution plans and query optimization.
- Strong experience with indexing strategies.
- Deep understanding of SQL Server internals.
- Strong knowledge of locking, blocking, isolation levels, deadlocks, wait statistics, and transaction management.
- Experience troubleshooting CPU, memory, storage, I/O, and concurrency issues.
- Strong experience with backup, recovery, replication, and disaster recovery.
- Solid database security knowledge.
- Experience managing databases containing hundreds of millions of records.
- Experience supporting large transactional systems.
- Strong scripting or programming experience using Python, PowerShell, C#, or similar.
- Experience with ETL/ELT and data integration.
- Experience supporting CI/CD database deployments.
- Experience working closely with software development teams.

Preferred Experience

- Azure SQL Managed Instance.
- SQL Server Always On.
- Azure Data Factory.
- Databricks.
- Debezium / CDC platforms.
- Kafka or Event Hubs.
- DACPAC / database deployment automation.
- Azure DevOps.
- Performance monitoring and observability platforms.
- Multi-tenant SaaS database environments.
- Customer data migration and onboarding projects.

Mandatory Engineering Attributes for All Three Roles Technical expertise alone will not be sufficient for these positions.

We are specifically looking for engineers who demonstrate the following characteristics.

1. Exceptional Critical Thinking

Candidates must be capable of deeply analyzing complex engineering problems rather than immediately applying familiar solutions.

They should be comfortable asking:

- Why does this architecture exist?
- What assumptions are we making?
- Where will this solution fail at scale?
- What happens during partial failure?




- What are the operational consequences?
- Is there a simpler architecture?
- What happens six months after this goes into production?

We expect engineers to challenge existing designs constructively and make decisions based on evidence, engineering principles, and production realities. 2. Creativity and Problem Solving

Candidates should be able to approach difficult problems from multiple directions and design practical solutions when no standard pattern completely fits the requirement.

We value engineers who can simplify complex systems, identify unconventional solutions, and balance architecture, operational complexity, performance, reliability, security, and cost.

3. Strong Engineering Fundamentals

Candidates must demonstrate strong engineering judgment beyond knowledge of specific tools or technologies.

This includes a deep understanding of areas such as:

- system design
- scalability
- concurrency
- distributed systems
- failure handling
- state management
- networking
- data consistency
- idempotency
- performance
- observability
- security
- maintainability
- testing
- reliability
- operational support
- debugging methodology

We are not looking for engineers who simply know how to configure a technology. We are looking for engineers who understand why systems behave the way they do. 4. Advanced Use of AI for Software Engineering

Strong use of AI-assisted engineering is mandatory for these roles.

Candidates should actively use modern AI coding tools to improve engineering speed, quality, analysis, and problem solving.

They should be comfortable using AI for:

- code generation
- code reviews
- architecture analysis
- debugging
- performance analysis
- refactoring
- test generation
- documentation
- security reviews
- log analysis
- database query analysis
- exploring unfamiliar codebases
- identifying edge cases
- accelerating repetitive development tasks

However, candidates must also demonstrate the engineering maturity to independently validate AI-generated output. We are specifically looking for engineers who treat AI as an engineering multiplier rather than a replacement for engineering judgment.

What We Expect at This Seniority

These are not task-execution roles.

Candidates should be capable of independently taking ownership of difficult technical problems, understanding the broader system impact, identifying risks that may not be immediately visible, and driving solutions from architecture through production.

They should be comfortable working across engineering teams, challenging technical decisions where necessary, mentoring other engineers, and communicating complex engineering concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

The ideal candidates will combine:

deep technical expertise + strong engineering fundamentals + critical thinking + creativity + AI-assisted engineering + production ownership.

Pay: ₹695,000.00 - ₹5,500,000.00 per year

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Chennai, Tamil Nadu 600113

📌 Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer (Chennai)
🏢 Multisolution Business Services
📍 Chennai