Senior Database Engineer (Azure SQL)

Location: Kaiserslautern, Germany; Netherlands; hybrid remote

Company

TOPdesk builds service management software for education, healthcare, government, and manufacturing, serving more than 10 million users with over 800 colleagues worldwide.

What you will do

• Own Azure SQL cost and resource optimization across a complex multi-tenant SaaS estate.
• Improve database performance through query analysis, execution-plan monitoring, index hygiene, locking, and concurrency optimization.
• Implement query tagging and observability to attribute load and cost to services and tenants.
• Own backup and restore validation, disaster-recovery testing, database security, and resilience in partnership with Cloud & SRE.
• Advise engineering teams on data ownership, ORMs, multi-tenancy patterns, and prevention of data-layer debt.
• Contribute to sharding, event-driven decomposition, and target-architecture decisions as the Java and MS SQL heritage platform is decomposed into microservices.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of hands-on experience as a Database Administrator, Database Engineer, or Performance Specialist in Microsoft SQL Server environments.
• Deep expertise in Microsoft SQL Server, especially Azure SQL Managed Instances and related services.
• Proven performance tuning experience at API scale, including index optimization, execution-plan analysis, query tuning, locking, and concurrency.
• Strong knowledge of elastic pools, resource sharing, noisy-neighbour management, and multi-tenant SaaS.
• Ability to advise on multi-tenancy trade-offs and work with Jooq, JPA, and custom persistence frameworks.
• Consultative communication skills and the ability to help engineering teams ship code-level fixes.

Nice to have

• Experience decomposing a long-tenured heritage platform into microservices.
• Experience reducing reliance on external database consultants.
• Strategic input into sharding, streaming, and platform-decomposition decisions.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted analysis and automation.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working environment based on freedom, trust, and responsibility.
• Open, informal, collaborative organization with little hierarchy.
• Personal development support, including the Netherlands “10 to Grow” programme with 10% of time and budget for professional growth.
• Cross-border collaboration and excellent employment conditions.

Hiring process

• Submit a CV and a short motivation letter through the application form.
• Include an example of turning a reactive, break-fix database situation into a structural and measurable improvement.