Principal SQL Database Administrator (SQL DBA, AWS, Performance Tuning, Architect)

As a Principal DBA, you will provide technical leadership and hands-on expertise across Vertafore's enterprise database ecosystem supporting large-scale, business-critical applications. This role is focused on Microsoft SQL Server Administration, SQL Development, Performance Engineering, Query Optimization, AWS Database Services, and Database Modernization.

You will partner with Engineering, Architecture, Product, DevOps, and SRE teams to drive database performance, scalability, reliability, and operational excellence. The ideal candidate combines deep expertise in SQL Server Administration, T-SQL Development, Performance Engineering, AWS database technologies, automation, and high availability solutions, with the ability to influence technical strategy and mentor engineering teams.

• Provide technical leadership for the architecture, administration, modernization, and support of SQL Server database platform across on-prem and AWS (EC2,RDS) supporting mission-critical applications.
•Partner with development teams to improve database architecture, SQL coding standards, application performance, and cloud database adoption across On-prem and AWS platforms.
•Lead database performance engineering initiatives through query tuning, Query Store, DMVs, execution plan analysis, wait statistics, indexing strategies, and workload optimization.
•Analyze, troubleshoot, and resolve complex production database issues involving performance, scalability, availability, and reliability while implementing long-term engineering solutions.
•Drive modernization efforts by optimizing database designs, T-SQL code, stored procedures, functions, views, ETL processes, and legacy database architectures.
•Participate in production support, critical incident management, root cause analysis, and on-call activities as required.
•Lead on-premises to AWS (EC2/RDS) database migrations, independently driving migration strategy, architecture decisions, risk mitigation, and performance optimization to ensure successful cloud transformation.
•Develop and enhance database automation, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code solutions, monitoring frameworks, and operational tooling to improve deployment reliability and engineering productivity.
•Establish database engineering standards, governance, security controls, monitoring practices, and operational best practices across the organization.