Senior Database Engineer (SQL Server)

Location: Hybrid role in London, with two days per week at the Moorgate offices.

Company

hirify.global is a profitable fintech platform providing business credit cards, SME spend management, savings products, and other financial tools for small businesses.

What you will do

• Own query and index performance across the transactional SQL Server estate using execution plans, Query Store, wait statistics, and production telemetry.
• Investigate and implement horizontal scaling approaches such as multi-cluster architecture, contained availability groups, and sharding.
• Remove bottlenecks from latency-critical card authorisation and ledger read/write paths while managing agreed p99 latency budgets.
• Own high availability, disaster recovery, availability groups, failover, backup and restore testing, and operational runbooks.
• Build self-service tooling for query-plan regression analysis and database performance diagnostics.
• Automate database operations with PowerShell, Python, and Terraform, while partnering with engineering and analytics teams on data-access design.

Requirements

• Substantial production experience with Microsoft SQL Server at scale, including Azure SQL or Managed Instances.
• Deep knowledge of query optimisation, plan cache, indexing, statistics, locking, blocking, isolation levels, tempdb, and wait types.
• Experience with ORMs, ideally Entity Framework, and the performance tradeoffs of ORM-based data access.
• Expert T-SQL skills, application-code experience, and proficiency with PowerShell or Python plus infrastructure as code.
• Hands-on experience with relational-data scaling, HA/DR design, production incidents, and measurable performance improvements.
• Working knowledge of PostgreSQL and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to non-database specialists.

Nice to have

• Experience researching or applying graph databases, zero-downtime data migrations, and database access through C#.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive workplace focused on authenticity and equal opportunity.
• Private healthcare with dental and optician services, plus worldwide travel insurance.
• 28 days of holiday plus bank holidays and enhanced parental leave.
• Pension salary-sacrifice scheme with up to 7% matching, EV salary sacrifice, cycle-to-work scheme, and season-ticket loan.
• Annual learning and wellbeing budget, six therapy sessions per year, and anniversary rewards including a paid sabbatical.
• Dog-friendly offices with snacks, drinks, recreational facilities, and office dogs.

Hiring process

• Applications are typically answered within three working days, or up to five working days during busy periods.