Database Administrator (MSSQL)

We are looking for a mid SQL Server DBA to join our Global Cloud DBA team in Portugal. You will own the day-to-day operation, availability and performance of MSSQL estates hosted on Azure and AWS for GDPR, EMEA and US customers, working a fixed shift aligned to EMEA business hours with rotational on-call responsibility for critical incidents outside those hours. You will also build working capability on Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL as secondary platforms to widen cross-platform coverage.

Location: Portugal, Lisbon

Responsibilities

• 24×7 production support for MSSQL estates across EMEA, GDPR and US customers — incident response, root-cause analysis and SLA-bound resolution of P1/P2 issues.
• Execution and validation of customer scripts and datafixes against production and pre-production databases, including impact assessment, backup/snapshot before execution and ownership of the rollback path.
• Backup, restore and recovery operations; periodic recovery testing and RTO/RPO validation.
• Database refresh, clone and copy activities across environments, including masked refreshes for non-production.
• High availability and disaster recovery: configuration, monitoring, failover testing and recovery.
• Performance monitoring and tuning — query and index optimisation, blocking and contention analysis, capacity and growth management.
• Planned change delivery: pre-implementation backups, implementation, post-implementation and post-patching validation within agreed maintenance windows.
• Access and permission management, user provisioning and privilege reviews.
• Patching, upgrades and migrations, including cloud migrations and version upgrades.
• Automation of routine operational tasks and contribution to self-healing and monitoring improvements.
• Proactive analysis of recurring incidents to identify and eliminate root causes rather than repeatedly remediating them.

Requirements

• 6–10 years of hands-on database administration experience, with a majority on Microsoft SQL Server in production environments.
• Demonstrable experience supporting enterprise or managed-services customers under formal SLAs.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or equivalent practical experience.
• Certifications such as Microsoft Azure Database Administrator Associate (DP-300), Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) or AWS Certified Database — Specialty are an advantage.
• Eligibility to work in Portugal.

Professional skills

• Strong written and spoken English; able to communicate directly with customer stakeholders.
• Structured troubleshooting under production pressure, with clear escalation and hand-over discipline across shifts.
• Ownership mindset — validating changes before they reach production and owning the rollback path.
• Willingness to cross-skill into the secondary database platforms; the team actively runs MSSQL ↔ Oracle cross-training to widen coverage across the on-call rotation.
• Documentation habit — runbooks, knowledge-base articles and post-incident notes.