Senior SQL Database Engineer

Job Title

Job Description

We are seeking an experienced Senior SQL Database Engineer to take technical ownership of the Microsoft SQL Server estate supporting Pacific Life Re's global business.

SQL is an important component of PL Re's technology landscape, supporting actuarial, pricing, research and operational workloads alongside business-critical applications and services across our international locations. The environment spans multiple regions and integrates with a wider infrastructure ecosystem covering compute, storage, backup, monitoring, security and disaster recovery.

This role is broader than traditional database administration. The successful candidate will own, engineer and mature the SQL capability, establishing consistent engineering standards, improving resilience and operational maturity, reducing technical debt and ensuring the estate remains secure, performant, recoverable and supportable.

The role will provide deep technical expertise across Microsoft SQL Server while working closely with Infrastructure, Application, Actuarial, Data, Security, Architecture, Service Management and enterprise Pacific Life teams. The successful candidate will also define and develop the future operating model for database services across PL Re, building on the foundations established through the SQL Target Operating Model and moving the capability towards a more standardised, automated and proactive engineering service.

Key Duties

• Act as the primary technical owner and subject matter expert for the PL Re database estate, with particular responsibility for Microsoft SQL Server and supporting PostgreSQL environments taking accountable for its health, stability, performance, resilience, security and lifecycle, while continuing to mature the SQL service and Target Operating Model.
• Define, maintain and govern SQL engineering standards covering builds, configuration, database design, storage, security, resilience, backup, monitoring and support, establishing standard build patterns and reusable engineering practices.
• Develop and maintain the technical roadmap for the SQL estate, proactively addressing lifecycle risk, technical debt, end-of-life technology and opportunities to simplify, consolidate and modernise.
• Proactively monitor and optimise SQL Server performance across databases, queries, indexing, memory, CPU, storage and I/O, while managing capacity, growth trends and future requirements.
• Own SQL backup, restore and recovery requirements, including retention, recoverability and routine validation, and define and test recovery procedures aligned with application recovery objectives and business continuity requirements, including disaster recovery exercises.
• Ensure SQL services are secure and compliant with PL Re and Pacific Life Technology Risk requirements, including patching, vulnerability remediation, hardening, role-based access, least privilege, service accounts, privileged access and appropriate audit evidence.
• Develop proactive monitoring, alerting and service-health measures covering availability, performance, capacity, backups and other critical database indicators.
• Provide advanced technical support for complex SQL incidents and problems, leading root-cause analysis and driving permanent remediation for significant or recurring issues.
• Provide SQL engineering expertise to infrastructure and application initiatives from initial design through implementation and transition to BAU, including migrations, upgrades, platform refreshes and major releases.
• Work closely with Infrastructure Engineering on compute, storage, networking, backup, monitoring and other platform dependencies, including technical validation before and after significant changes.
• Partner with actuarial, pricing, research, operational, application and data teams to translate database requirements into secure, resilient, performant and supportable solutions, advising on database design, performance, security, migrations and other specialist database activities.
• Maintain an accurate inventory of SQL servers, instances and databases, including ownership, lifecycle and relationships to applications and services, with appropriate representation within configuration and asset-management processes.
• Develop automation for routine DBA activities including provisioning, configuration, maintenance, health checks and reporting, while maintaining clear technical standards, documentation and operational runbooks to reduce manual intervention and dependency on individuals.
• Build effective relationships with Pacific Life enterprise teams, third-party partners and PL Re stakeholders to align standards, share good practice and establish a sustainable global support model, driving continual improvement through automation, observability and proactive management of risk, performance and resilience.

Qualifications, Expertise and Attributes

Essential

• Strong commercial experience administering and engineering Microsoft SQL Server in complex enterprise environments.
• Practical experience administering and supporting PostgreSQL environments, with Microsoft SQL Server remaining the primary area of technical expertise.
• Deep knowledge of SQL Server installation, configuration, upgrades, patching and lifecycle management.
• Strong SQL performance tuning and troubleshooting capability, including indexing, execution plans, locking and blocking, memory, CPU, disk I/O and query optimisation.
• Strong understanding of SQL Server backup, restore and recovery technologies and practices.
• Experience designing and supporting highly available and resilient SQL environments.
• Strong knowledge of SQL Server security, authentication, permissions, service accounts and privileged access.
• Strong experience of database migrations and platform or infrastructure change.
• Experience managing database capacity, storage and performance.
• Strong scripting and automation capability, ideally using PowerShell and T-SQL.
• Experience operating database environments under formal Incident, Problem and Change Management processes.
• Experience supporting critical production systems and participating in major incident and root-cause analysis.
• Strong technical documentation skills and experience developing operational procedures and runbooks.
• Ability to work effectively across infrastructure, application, architecture, security and service-management disciplines.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate detailed technical issues into clear risks, options and recommendations.
• Demonstrable ability to take ownership of a technical service and improve its maturity, rather than simply administer an existing environment.
• Experience with SQL Server running on virtualised or private-cloud infrastructure.
• Experience supporting SQL workloads through infrastructure migrations or hypervisor and platform transformation.

Desirable

• Experience designing, implementing, troubleshooting and supporting highly available database platforms.
• Capable of troubleshooting issues that cross database, application, operating system, storage, network and clustering
• Experience with enterprise backup and recovery platforms such as Veeam.
• Experience with enterprise monitoring and observability platforms.
• Experience with ServiceNow and mature IT Service Management environments.
• Experience of database discovery, configuration management and CMDB integration.
• Experience supporting actuarial, financial-services or other highly data-intensive workloads.
• Familiarity with public-cloud database services and hybrid database architectures.
• Awareness of other database technologies such as Oracle would be beneficial.

Working For Pacific Life Re

Every person in our global team is valued for the unique qualities they bring to our business and we seek to build their expertise and support their individual ambitions at every step. Of course, we take our work seriously and we know our team can operate under great pressure. We work hard and thrive on achievement, but we also know how to have fun and relax too. We regularly host a range of team building days to strengthen our team's connection with each other and reflect on their successes.

Providing employees with a healthy work-life balance is very important to our culture. We have a wide range of employee benefits and we host regular social activities and well being initiatives. We are also committed to supporting our employee's involvement in their communities, by actively fundraising, hosting charity events and overseeing volunteering opportunities.

Benefits (Only for Permanent and Fixed Term Employees)

Leave

• 25 days of annual leave with option to buy/sell more days

• Adoption and fertility leave

• Generous enhanced parental leave

Healthcare

• Comprehensive private insurance coverage for employee and dependents

• Group Life Insurance coverage of 9x basic annual salary and Group Income Protection up to 75% of basic annual salary

• Optical benefits

Savings & Retirement

• 15% combined employee/employer contributions

Wellness

• Subsidized gym membership

• Access to Employee Assistance Program

• Cycle to Work and Electric Car Salary Sacrifice Scheme

• Time off for volunteering

• Charitable matching of employee donations

You Can Be Who You Are

We are committed to a culture of diversity and inclusion that embraces the authenticity of all employees, partners and communities. We support all employees to thrive and achieve their fullest potential.

As part of our commitment to diversity and inclusion, we will provide reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process to ensure equal access to applicants with disabilities. Please contact us about your needs so that we can discuss these with you to make sure that suitable adjustments are made, where possible.

Pacific Life Re Values

Please click here to view our company values