Enterprise Database Engineer

At Acra Lending our employees enjoy an opportunity to work with great people. We celebrate several events throughout the year accompanied by raffles and giveaways for employees nationwide. We are especially proud to give back to our community and truly enjoy one another's company.

We are looking for candidates to join our team who are passionate about their vocation. Who are committed to making a contribution and are looking to gain experience in order to grow in their career. Our headquarters are located on a beautiful campus in Irvine, California and if you work out of our Irvine office we can also provide a free gym membership.

Summary

We are seeking an experienced Database Engineer with 5-10 years of experience to own the design, implementation, migration, architecture, administration, and lifecycle management of enterprise database platforms. This role focuses on Microsoft SQL Server across both on-premises and cloud environments, including AWS RDS architecture, migrations, optimization, monitoring, and operational management. The role also supports a broad range of SQL-based technologies and modern data platforms, including data warehouses and data lake solutions (e.g., Snowflake or similar).

The ideal candidate brings strong hands-on experience building and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines, enabling reliable data exchange between systems, and supporting reporting and analytics workloads. Experience designing and executing cloud database migration strategies, particularly migrating on-prem SQL Server environments to AWS RDS, is highly desirable. This role plays a key part in ensuring data is well-structured, secure, highly available, accessible, and efficiently processed across operational and analytical systems while supporting scalable cloud-native data architectures.

Compensation

Base salary: $135K - $150K based on experience.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Own the design, implementation, and lifecycle management of Microsoft SQL Server platforms (on-prem and cloud-hosted), including standards, reference architectures, and technical roadmaps aligned to business needs
• Engineer and operate high availability and disaster recovery solutions (e.g., Always On Availability Groups, failover clustering, log shipping, replication), including backup and restore strategy, RPO/RTO definition, and routine disaster recovery testing
• Perform core database administration functions, including regular backups, restores, recovery validation, integrity checks, patching, and ongoing maintenance to ensure system reliability and data protection
• Lead database performance engineering efforts, including SQL query tuning, execution plan analysis, indexing strategy, and statistics maintenance; establish performance baselines, capacity planning, and service level objectives.
• Implement and enforce database security controls, including least-privilege access, auditing, encryption, and secure configuration standards; partner with Infrastructure and Security teams on vulnerability remediation and compliance requirements
• Design, build, and maintain data integration pipelines and reporting workflows (e.g., SSIS, SQL Agent jobs, stored procedures, ETL/ELT frameworks); manage scheduling, error handling, data lineage, and operational support for data refresh processes.
• Develop and support data exchange mechanisms between systems, including APIs, file-based integrations, and cross-platform data movement across operational databases and data warehouse/lake environments
• Build automation to improve reliability and reduce operational overhead (patching, maintenance jobs, provisioning, deployments), leveraging scripting and repeatable processes; maintain runbooks and operational documentation
• Oversee and coordinate third-party database administration vendors and managed service providers, including defining scope, reviewing deliverables, managing SLAs, enforcing change control, and ensuring secure and compliant access.
• Establish observability for database and pipeline health (monitoring, alerting, dashboards); participate in incident response/on-call, perform root-cause analysis, and drive corrective and preventive actions
• Partner with application engineering, BI/reporting, and operational teams to review database designs, optimize data access patterns, support releases, and resolve production issues
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews and database design reviews; mentor team members and promote best practices across schema design, data modeling, and database change management

Knowledge and Skills

• Advanced expertise in Microsoft SQL Server, including T-SQL development and performance tuning.
• Strong experience with database administration tasks, including backups, restores, recovery models, and maintenance planning
• Strong experience writing and optimizing complex SQL queries
• Hands-on experience with ETL/ELT development (SSIS or similar tools).
• Proficiency in scripting for automation (SQL (T-SQL, PL/SQL), Python, Power Shell, Bash/Shell scripting,…