SQL DBA Team Lead

Key Responsibilities

Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and guidance to other DBAs and engineers within the Managed SQL Service team.

Ensure contracted SLAs and service commitments are consistently met, and act early where they are at risk.

Manage the team's queue and workload distribution, balancing reactive tickets, planned work and project commitments.

Ensure documentation, runbooks and configuration records are accurate and kept current for every client.

Maintain proactive health checking, capacity planning and performance baselining across the estate.

Attend customer service reviews and present technical findings, risks, and recommendations to client stakeholders.

Support presales: scoping database work, sizing effort, contributing to proposals and statements of work

Lead the technical onboarding of new clients: discovery, health check, remediation plan and transition into managed service.

Plan and lead database installations, upgrades, patching, migrations, refreshes, and decommissioning following controlled change management

Participate in an on-call rota to support a 24/7 managed service.

Primary Technical Skills

The ideal candidate will have gained the majority of the following skills.

Substantial hands-on SQL Server administration experience across multiple versions (2012 through to current releases)

Deep working knowledge of high availability and disaster recovery: Always On Availability Groups, Windows Failover Clustering, FCIs, log shipping and replication

Strong backup and recovery expertise, including backup to URL/blob storage, point-in-time recovery and full restore testing.

Experience configuring and troubleshooting Transactional Replication

Solid understanding of networking, Windows Server operating systems, and core infrastructure services such as Active Directory and DNS.

Demonstrable performance tuning ability: execution plan analysis, wait statistics, Query Store, indexing strategy, statistics and query rewriting.

Strong security administration experience, including authentication models, permissions, Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), Always Encrypted, auditing, and vulnerability remediation.

Expertise in scripting and automation using PowerShell and T-SQL.

Experience with an enterprise monitoring platform such as Redgate SQL Monitor, SolarWinds SQL Sentry, Datadog or equivalent.

Exposure to Microsoft Azure, including Azure SQL, IaaS, or hybrid environments

Desirable Skills

Experience in the following areas would be beneficial:

Experience working within an MSP, consultancy, or other multi-client environment, including the ability to manage competing priorities

Experience supporting data warehousing, reporting, or business intelligence environments.

Administration of SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).

Exposure to other database platforms and technologies, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and AWS database services.