Howden
Senior Database Platform Engineer
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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, utilization, 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
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Database Modernisation (15%)
- Support the evolution of the database estate towards PostgreSQL and modern cloud-native database services
- Define and improve database deployment, configuration, and operational standards
- Contribute to migration and modernisation initiatives across legacy database platforms
- Help reduce technical debt through platform simplification and standardisation
- Evaluate new database technologies and operating models where they create business value
Data Platform Integration (10%)
- Support integration between database platforms, Databricks, and analytics services
- Work alongside Data Engineers to optimise data movement and workload performance
- Contribute database expertise to modern data platform initiatives
- Help ensure database services can support emerging analytics and AI workloads
Security, Governance & Compliance (10%)
- Implement and maintain role-based access controls and database security standards
- Support audit, compliance, and governance activities
- Manage database access processes and periodic reviews
- Ensure database services align with organisational security and operational policies
- Produce operational evidence and documentation where required for regulatory and audit purposes
What We Need From You
Required
- 5+ years database engineering or DBA experience supporting production platforms
- Strong SQL Server expertise including administration, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and optimisation
- Experience with Azure SQL and cloud-hosted database services
- High Availability and Disaster Recovery experience including backup, restore, and recovery planning
- Experience managing business-critical production services
- Strong troubleshooting skills across database, infrastructure, and application interactions
- Monitoring and observability experience within enterprise environments
- Automation experience using PowerShell, Python, or similar scripting languages
- Strong understanding of database security, access control, and governance
- Experience working within structured incident, problem, and change management processes
Strongly Preferred
- PostgreSQL administration and engineering experience
- Experience supporting enterprise data warehouse environments
- Databricks administration or integration experience
- Azure cloud platform experience
- Infrastructure-as-Code familiarity (Terraform or Bicep)
- Experience with modern monitoring and observability platforms
- Experience supporting cloud migration or database modernisation programmes
- Knowledge of lakehouse architectures and modern analytics platforms
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What Actually Matters
- Reliability mindset – you understand databases are critical infrastructure and treat them accordingly
- Operational excellence – prevention is always better than firefighting
- Pragmatism over purity – you choose the right solution, not the fashionable one
- Automation-first thinking – eliminate repetitive manual work wherever possible
- Continuous improvement – you leave systems better than you found them
- Documentation discipline – knowledge should be shared, not hidden
- Collaboration skills – you work effectively across engineering, operations, and data teams
- Ownership mentality – you see problems through to resolution
What We Offer
- Actual flexibility: Remote-first with occasional travel to London for planning sessions, workshops, and team events. We care about outcomes, not attendance.
- Real learning budget: Support for training, certifications, and conferences that improve both your expertise and our platforms.
- Interesting technical challenges: Opportunities to work across SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Databricks, modern data platforms, and emerging AI-enabled services.
- Grown-up engineering culture:
- Automation is encouraged and expected
- Technical decisions are driven by evidence and context
- Documentation matters
- Blameless post-mortems when things go wrong
- Operational excellence is valued as highly as new feature delivery
- We continuously invest in platform improvement and technical debt reduction
Add the usual stuff here: How to apply, interview process.
What do we offer in return?
A career that you define. At Howden, we value diversity – there is no one Howden type. Instead, we’re looking for individuals who share the same values as us:
- Our successes have all come from someone brave enough to try something new
- We support each other in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges
- We are determined to make a positive difference at work and beyond
Reasonable adjustments
We're committed to providing reasonable accommodations at Howden to ensure that our positions align well with your needs. Besides the usual adjustments such as software, IT, and office setups, we can also accommodate other changes such as flexible hours* or hybrid working*.
If you're excited by this role but have some doubts about whether it’s the right fit for you, send us your application – if your profile fits the role’s criteria, we will be in touch to assist in helping to get you set up with any reasonable adjustments you may require.
*Not all positions can accommodate changes to working hours or locations. Reach out to your Recruitment Partner if you want to know more.
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