Senior Database Platform Engineer

Location: Greater London

Who are we?

Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries.

People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change  Role We are looking for a Senior Database Platform Engineer to own the reliability, performance, security and evolution of our database platforms.

This is not a traditional ticket-driven DBA role. While you'll be responsible for keeping our SQL Server and Azure SQL estate healthy, secure and performant, you'll also help modernise our data platforms and support our transition towards PostgreSQL, cloud-native database services and modern lakehouse architectures.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll be troubleshooting performance issues, validating recovery strategies, automating operational processes, improving observability and helping shape the future of our database estate.

You will act as the team's database SME, working closely with Platform Engineers, Data Engineers and Operations teams to ensure critical data services remain resilient, scalable and fit for future needs.

What You'll Actually DoDatabase Engineering & Operations (40%)Own the operational health, availability and performance of SQL Server and Azure SQL platforms

Provision, configure and maintain production and non-production database environments

Plan and execute upgrades, patching and platform lifecycle activities

Diagnose and resolve database performance issues across infrastructure, workloads and application interactions

Establish and maintain database operational standards and engineering practices

Manage platform capacity, utilisation and performance forecasting

Ensure critical database platforms remain secure, resilient and operationally supportable

Resilience, Recovery & Reliability (25%)Design, implement and validate backup, recovery and disaster recovery capabilities

Own restore testing and recovery readiness across critical platforms

Support high availability solutions and service resilience initiatives

Implement proactive monitoring, alerting and observability for database services

Participate in incident response, problem management and post-incident reviews

Drive continual improvement through automation, root cause analysis and operational learning

Reduce operational toil through self-healing and automation where practical

Database Modernisation (15%)Support the evolution of the database estate towards PostgreSQL and modern cloud-native database services

Define and improve database deployment, configuration and operational standards

Contribute to migration and modernisation initiatives across legacy database platforms

Help reduce technical debt through platform simplification and standardisation

Evaluate new database technologies and operating models where they create business value

Data Platform Integration (10%)Support integration between database platforms, Databricks and analytics services

Work alongside Data Engineers to optimise data movement and workload performance

Contribute database expertise to modern data platform initiatives

Help ensure database services can support emerging analytics and AI workloads

Security, Governance & Compliance (10%)Implement and maintain role-based access controls and database security standards

Support audit, compliance…