Salary Range: $ To $ Annually
Position Summary
The Software Engineering department is seeking a Senior Database Performance Engineer
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Our products power mission-critical workflows used by thousands of customers across Canada, with data at the center of every experience. As our platform continues to scale, we are looking for a passionate and highly skilled developer with deep SQL expertise. You must excel at diagnosing complex performance issues, optimizing SQL query execution paths, and ensuring our database servers operate at peak efficiency.
You will play a critical role in keeping our systems stable, reliable, and fast as we introduce new applications, expand integrations, and evolve our backend services.
As an ideal candidate, you bring a deep understanding of Microsoft SQL Server internals, performance tuning techniques, and modern ORM frameworks such as Hibernate. You are methodical and analytical, with a strong ability to translate application behaviour—particularly within Java-based systems—into database performance insights. You thrive on troubleshooting, data-driven decision making, and building long-term solutions that prevent issues before they occur.
Success in this role means ensuring stable, well-performing database environments; establishing best practices across engineering teams; and collaborating closely with developers to promote a performance-first mindset. You will be the trusted expert for database performance, guiding teams to write efficient SQL, optimize schema designs, and tune server configurations for predictable, scalable throughput.
Competencies Critical for Success
- Performance & Analysis – Diagnose and resolve complex database performance issues while analyzing SQL execution behavior to identify and implement improvements
- Advocacy & Influence – Communicate database concepts clearly to developers, enabling actionable solutions and advocating proactive changes
- Proactive Optimization – Drive strategies to prevent issues and deliver continuous, measurable performance gains
- Technical Depth – Apply expertise across SQL Server, ORM frameworks, and Java systems to optimize application performance
- Backlog Ownership – Maintain and prioritize a performance improvement backlog; determine what to own directly versus what to drive through development teams
Primary Responsibilities
- Model professionalism and lead by example, promoting database best practices across engineering teams
- Own database performance tuning activities including query optimization, indexing strategies, and execution plan analysis
- Monitor, analyze, and tune SQL Server instances in collaboration with Infrastructure DBA’s to ensure high availability, low latency, and predictable capacity
- Collaborate with Java/Hibernate teams to advise on efficient data-access patterns and ORM configuration
- Support development teams by reviewing SQL-related code, database migrations, and query-heavy features
- Author & submit pull requests to development teams that include SQL performance tuning changes
- Drive root-cause analysis for performance degradation, slow queries, blocking, and deadlocks
- Maintain comprehensive documentation for performance patterns, indexing strategies, and tuning guidelines
- Participate in architectural discussions to ensure database scalability and long-term stability
- Troubleshoot production issues, lead database recovery efforts, and guide teams through performance incidents & escalations
- Remove operational impediments by improving tooling, observability, and database-related workflows
- Work independently to investigate, develop, and deliver performance improvements end-to-end
- Maintain and prioritize a dedicated database performance backlog, identifying items for self-directed delivery versus items requiring…
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