Database Administrator

At TOPdesk, our Azure SQL estate is a critical part of how we deliver a reliable SaaS platform to more than 10 million users worldwide. As our platform evolves, we’re looking for a senior Database Administrator with deep Azure SQL expertise to help us manage performance, scalability, and cost in a more structural and proactive way.

We opened this role because Azure SQL is a material part of TOPdesk’s hosting cost and the foundation of customer-facing performance, and we’re at a point in our platform evolution where reactive optimisation isn’t enough. We’re actively decomposing a long-tenured Java/MS SQL monolith into microservices, and we need deep database expertise embedded in that journey, not called in afterincidents.

You’llwork closely with platform engineering and development teams while we continue decomposing a long-standing Java and Microsoft SQL monolith into microservices. The goal is to ensure the data layer remains a strength throughout that transition — not a constraint.

Azure SQL represents a significant part of TOPdesk’s hosting cost and plays a major role in application performance for our customers. Today, a large part of our optimisation work happens after incidents or escalations. We want to get ahead of that.

Your mission is to bring deep database performance engineering expertise into TOPdesk and help create a structurally healthy Azure SQL environment: performant, observable, scalable, and cost‑efficient.

You’ll combine performance engineering, governance, and developer enablement to improve how we operate and evolve our database landscape.

• Cost management and resource optimisation
  . Identify the inefficiencies — noisy neighbours, abusive API usage, sub‑optimal resource allocation — that drive Azure SQL cost, and implement structural savings.
• Performance engineering. Structurally monitor query response times and execution plans so the application stays snappy as data volume grows. Index hygiene is a core part of the role: remove redundant or sub‑optimal indexes; add smarter ones to support heavy API traffic.
• Observability and accountability. Implement query tagging and advanced monitoring so the business can see which services and customers are driving load and cost on the database.
• Developer enablement. Act as a specialist who advises engineering teams, helps them own their data solutions well, and prevents data‑layer technical debt from accumulating across new microservices.
• Governance. Move us toward a model where domain teams maintain strong control and integrity over their data with deep DBA partnership — reducing reliance on ad‑hoc, externally‑run queries against production.
• Target architecture contribution. Help shape decisions on sharding strategies, multi‑tenancy models, and event‑driven decomposition to reduce database load over time.

• Work the estate structurally — patterns and policy, not just individual outliers.
• Measure beforeoptimising. Baselines and dashboards before opinions.
• Consultative, not gatekeeping. Pair with engineering teams; transfer knowledge as you go.
• Treat cost and performance as joint objectives where ever possible, not a forced trade‑off.
• Make governance part of the craft, not an afterthought.

• Primary database estate: Azure SQL (Managed Instances) and related flavours; elastic pools; multi‑tenant SaaS.
• Application layer: Java monolith being decomposed into microservices. Jooq, JPA, and custom persistence frameworks in active use.
• Broader engineering stack (context): Python, Type Script, Vue, Postgres, Azure;
  Terraform‑managed infrastructure. Your primary focus is Azure SQL.
• Scale: 10M+ SaaS users; a complex, hybrid SaaS estate with significant per‑tenant variability.

• A documented baseline of Azure SQL cost, performance, and tenant‑impact metrics — and measurable improvement against it.
• An index‑hygiene program delivered: redundant indexes removed, smarter indexes added for the hottest API paths.
• Query tagging and observability in place. Cost‑per‑service and cost‑per‑tenant attribution visible to product and platform teams.
• Noisy‑neighbor and…