Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty infrastructure and production role where you'll spend about 70% of your time keeping enterprise SQL Server environments alive, breathing, and scaling, with the remaining 30% handling development support and automation. If you like putting out fires after they've already brought down production, look elsewhere; this team expects you to catch resource starvation, blocking chains, and capacity bottlenecks before anyone notices. It's a foundational operational gig where your proactive monitoring directly dictates whether the business runs smoothly.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
You'll spend your days waist-deep in telemetry, watching TempDB, transaction logs, I/O latency, and memory allocation across a sprawling enterprise footprint. When an Always On Availability Group hiccups or a complex batch job tanks CPU at 2 AM, you're the one diagnosing execution plans, looking at wait stats, and performing root cause analysis. Beyond firefighting, you'll be writing PowerShell scripts and T-SQL to automate repetitive health checks, reviewing raw code from devs to make sure they aren't dropping unindexed tables into production, and managing patching cycles without breaking downstream reporting.
The Core Tech Stack
You need deep, battle-tested expertise in Microsoft SQL Server administration, specifically with Always On Availability Groups, Windows Failover Clustering, and bulletproof disaster recovery strategies. Mastery of T-SQL and performance tuning tools like SQL Sentry, SolarWinds DPA, or Query Store is non-negotiable because you'll be expected to read execution plans like a native language. PowerShell is your best friend here for scripting out automation, and having some familiarity with SSIS, SSRS, or Azure cloud architectures will help you interface smoothly with the infrastructure and BI teams.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring manager to throw a gnarly production scenario at you, such as a sudden, massive spike in PLE (Page Life Expectancy) accompanied by heavy disk I/O and blocking on a high-transaction table. They want to hear your methodical approach to isolating whether it's a missing index, a bad execution plan change, or TempDB contention, rather than just guessing. They'll also likely test your T-SQL optimization chops by asking you to walk through rewriting a poorly performing correlated subquery or untangling a deadlock graph.
Application Advice
Make sure your resume doesn't just list what tools you've used, but highlights the actual scale of the production environments you've managed and the uptime you've maintained. Explicitly weave in keywords like Always On Availability Groups, Query Store, wait statistics, T-SQL optimization, and PowerShell automation so your application sails past the ATS filters. If you have any experience working in regulated industries like healthcare or dealing with strict data security and compliance audits, put that right near the top.