Principal SQL Server Performance Engineer

Hiring: Senior / Principal SQL Server Performance Engineer
Primarily Remote
Contract to hire
Occasional onsite support may be required in Northern California, Jacksonville, FL, and Miami, FL. Florida-based candidates are preferred, but strong candidates who are comfortable traveling will also be considered.
We are looking for a highly hands-on SQL Server Performance Engineer who can diagnose and resolve complex production database performance issues.
This is not a traditional SQL Server DBA role focused mainly on backups, migrations, patching, HA/DR, or general administration.
The ideal candidate should be able to independently identify the root cause of SQL Server performance problems and implement the technical solution.
Key areas we are looking for:
• Deep Microsoft SQL Server performance tuning and optimization
• Advanced execution plan analysis
• Query Store, DMVs, Extended Events, and wait statistics
• CPU, memory, I/O, latency, and resource bottleneck analysis
• Blocking, deadlocks, concurrency, and locking troubleshooting
• Advanced indexing and statistics optimization
• Complex T-SQL and stored procedure tuning/re-engineering
• Query optimization and reduction of logical reads / execution time
• SQL Server internals and query optimizer knowledge
• Ability to diagnose performance issues from both the database and system level
• Hands-on implementation of fixes — not just monitoring or providing recommendations
• Strong production troubleshooting and root-cause analysis experience
• Experience supporting large-scale / high-volume OLTP environments
The ideal background is someone who has worked deeply in SQL/database engineering, query optimization, or database performance engineering and later developed broader DBA/platform expertise.
We are particularly interested in candidates who can demonstrate real examples such as:
Reducing long-running query or stored procedure execution times
Diagnosing sustained high CPU or memory pressure
Identifying bad execution plans or cardinality issues
Resolving blocking/deadlocks and wait-stat bottlenecks
Redesigning indexes or T-SQL to improve production performance
Measuring and validating performance improvements after implementation
Strong communication and technical leadership are equally important. This person will interact directly with customers and technical stakeholders, explain root causes clearly, recommend solutions, and confidently represent the engineering team. Financial services, banking, payments, fintech, or other high-volume transactional environments are highly preferred.
The national base pay range below is a good faith estimate of what our client may pay for new hires. Actual pay may vary based on Client's assessment of the candidates knowledge, skills, abilities (KSAs), related experience, education, certifications and ability to meet required minimum job qualifications. Other factors impacting pay include prevailing wages in the work location and internal equity $170000 - $190000

Work arrangement
Yes