Lead Database & Data Platform Engineer

🇧🇷 🇦🇷 🇨🇴 🇲🇽 🇵🇾 🇨🇱 🇨🇷 🇵🇪 🇺🇾 Exclusive to candidates based in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Paraguay, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, and Uruguay
Requirements
Must-haves
7+ years of professional experience
Deep and current Microsoft SQL Server administration
Hands-on experience with SQL Server installation and configuration on a self-managed server (EC2 or on-premise), including OS-level work beneath a live production instance
Experience with Windows Server administration, including OS upgrades and migrations
Recently performed SQL Server upgrade, including source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, and the Windows Server version pairing
Experience with SQL Server high availability (Always On Availability Groups, failover clustering)
Experience with MySQL administration
Experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch)
Proficiency with AI tools (e.g., Claude) applied to daily work
Prior end-to-end ownership of a production database estate, including assessing an
inherited environment and driving it to a measurably better state
Experience setting data standards and reviewing schema and data-access design
across application teams
Strong communication skills in both spoken and written English
What makes you stand out
Most recent SQL Server upgrade performed, stated on the profile: source and target versions, in-place or side-by-side, year, and the Windows Server version pairing
Why this role exists:
This position reports into the Platform team and serves as the top technical authority on data for both engineering groups
The pressing need is someone able to jump straight into a time-sensitive OS upgrade ahead of year-end
The broader mandate is bringing the estate to a standard that holds up with customers, auditors, and the insurer
The company was formed through a merger and runs two separate stacks, with no single owner accountable for the estate to date
We're looking for someone motivated to solve this at the root rather than apply a temporary fix, with the mandate to do so
Nice-to-haves
Startup experience
Snowflake administration and development
ETL pipelines and tools (e.g., Rivery, dbt)
Data warehouse design and development
Data lake on S3
BI/analytics tools (e.g., Metabase, QuickSight)
Data governance and data quality practice
SQL Server migration to a managed service
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent
What you will work on
Own the database and data estate end to end: assess what we have, run a time-critical upgrade as the first job, and then set the direction and standards that mature the whole environment
The company is the product of a merger, so we run two stacks — C#/.NET on Microsoft SQL Server, and TypeScript/JavaScript on MySQL — both in AWS
Our SQL Server is BYOL on EC2: we install, configure, and operate it ourselves, an on-premise setup that happens to live in AWS. MySQL runs on RDS
First 90 days
1. Assess the current estate: inventory, backup and recovery posture, high availability configuration, monitoring and alerting gaps, access model, capacity, and cost.
2. Produce a written state-of-the-estate and a prioritized remediation plan
Near-term priority
1. Upgrade the Windows Server OS hosting our production SQL Server estate — Windows
Server 2016 → 2022 — across an Always On Availability Group cluster, with no data loss and
minimal downtime. Must do before the end of 2026
2. Then upgrade the SQL Server version from our current SQL Server 2017, and own the recommendation on whether we stay self-managed on EC2 or move to AWS RDS managed SQL Server after the upgrade.
Core ownership
1. Full ownership of administration, operation,s and optimization for all relational databases: SQL Server (self-managed on EC2) and MySQL (RDS)
2. Performance tuning, monitoring and alerting, backup and recovery, high availability and failover, security and access management, capacity and cost
Maturing the estate
1. Define and enforce database standards across the C#/.NET SQL Server and TypeScript/MySQL codebases; act as the technical authority on schema and data-
access design for both engineering teams
2. Own data observability: monitoring, alerting, and capacity forecasting against agreed service levels
3. Establish backup and DR testing, access governan,ce and change control that stand up to SOC 2 and our cyber insurer
4. Produce and maintain a data platform roadmap covering both relational stacks, Snowfl,ake and the analytics estate
5. Set direction for the data engineering team on database matters
Secondary
1. Snowflake administration, including usage and cost monitoring
2. Database development — stored procedures, schema design, query optimization
3. Data warehouse and data engineering work alongside the data platform team; support internal and external analytics and BI

Work arrangement
No