Job Description & Details
This is a heavy-duty backend role that sits right at the intersection of advanced T-SQL engineering and traditional DBA work. If you enjoy digging into execution plans, untangling gnarly deadlocks, and making legacy queries run in milliseconds rather than minutes, this position gives you the ownership to actually fix those architectural bottlenecks.
What You'll Actually Be Doing
Expect your day to be a split between high-level database design and relentless firefighting. You will be writing complex T-SQL, optimizing stored procedures, and reviewing code written by application developers who might not understand indexing strategies. You'll also handle the less glamorous but critical DBA tasks like managing Azure SQL environments, setting up disaster recovery plans, wrangling SSIS packages, and ensuring that deployment pipelines in Azure DevOps don't break production at 5 PM.
The Core Tech Stack
Microsoft SQL Server is your bread and butter here, and you need to know it inside and out—specifically SSMS, T-SQL, window functions, and CTEs. Beyond writing code, you live and breathe execution plan analysis and indexing strategies. Because they are hybridizing their infrastructure, solid hands-on experience with Azure SQL Database, Azure Managed Instance, and Azure Data Factory is non-negotiable. If you don't know how to track down a blocking chain or optimize a poorly written join, you're going to struggle out of the gate.
Interview Expectations
Expect the hiring team to hand you a terribly performing query with a nested loop and missing indexes, asking you to walk them through how you'd diagnose and rewrite it. They want to see your methodology for reading execution plans and handling parameter sniffing. Secondly, they will test your concurrency knowledge by throwing a deadlock scenario at you, wanting to know exactly how you trace root causes and prevent them using isolation levels or schema adjustments.
Application Advice
Your resume needs to skip the generic buzzwords and focus heavily on measurable performance wins. Don't just list that you 'wrote stored procedures'—instead, state that you 'optimized indexing and rewrote T-SQL queries to reduce batch processing time by 40%.' Make sure keywords like execution plan analysis, T-SQL, SSIS, Azure SQL, and database performance tuning are explicitly written in your experience section to clear the automated screening filters.