Senior Database Platform Engineer

Who are we? Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries. People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden. The Role   We are looking for a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms.   This is not a traditional ticket-driven DBA role. While you'll be responsible for keeping our SQL Server and Azure SQL estate healthy, secure and performant, you'll also help   modernise   our data platforms and support our transition towards PostgreSQL, cloud-native database services and modern   lakehouse   architectures.   This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll be troubleshooting performance issues, validating recovery strategies, automating operational processes, improving observability and helping shape the future of our database estate.   You will act as the team's database SME, working closely with Platform Engineers, Data Engineers and Operations teams to ensure critical data services remain resilient, scalable and fit for future needs.   What You'll Actually Do   Database Engineering & Operations (40%)   Own the operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms   Provision, configure and maintain production and non-production database environments   Plan and execute upgrades, patching and platform lifecycle activities   Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infrastructure, workloads and application interactions   Establish and maintain database operational standards and engineering practices   Manage platform capacity,   utilisation   and performance forecasting   Ensure critical database platforms remain secure, resilient and operationally supportable   Resilience, Recovery & Reliability (25%)   Design, implement and validate backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities   Own restore testing and recovery readiness across critical platforms   Support high availability solutions and service resilience initiatives   Implement proactive monitoring, alerting and observability for database services   Participate in incident response, problem management and post-incident reviews   Drive continual improvement through automation, root cause analysis and operational learning   Reduce operational toil through self-healing and automation where practical   Database   Modernisation  …