Senior SQL Database Engineer

This role currently requires two days per week in our London office. From September 2027, office attendance will increase to four days per week in line with the company's updated hybrid working policy. We are seeking an experienced Senior SQL Database Engineer to take technical ownership of the Microsoft SQL Server estate supporting Pacific Life Re's global business.

Senior SQL Database Engineer

This role currently requires two days per week in our London office. From September 2027, office attendance will increase to four days per week in line with the company's updated hybrid working policy. We are seeking an experienced Senior SQL Database Engineer to take technical ownership of the Microsoft SQL Server estate supporting Pacific Life Re's global business. SQL is an important component of PL Re's technology landscape, supporting actuarial, pricing, research and operational workloads alongside business-critical applications and services across our international locations.

The environment spans multiple regions and integrates with a wider infrastructure ecosystem covering compute, storage, backup, monitoring, security and disaster recovery. This role is broader than traditional database administration. The successful candidate will own, engineer and mature the SQL capability, establishing consistent engineering standards, improving resilience and operational maturity, reducing technical debt and ensuring the estate remains secure, performant, recoverable and supportable.

The role will provide deep technical expertise across Microsoft SQL Server while working closely with Infrastructure, Application, Actuarial, Data, Security, Architecture, Service Management and enterprise Pacific Life teams. The successful candidate will also define and develop the future operating model for database services across PL Re, building on the foundations established through the SQL Target Operating Model and moving the capability towards a more standardised, automated and proactive engineering service.

• Act as the primary technical owner and subject matter expert for the PL Re database estate, with particular responsibility for Microsoft SQL Server and supporting PostgreSQL environments taking accountable for its health, stability, performance, resilience, security and lifecycle, while continuing to mature the SQL service and Target Operating Model.
• Define, maintain and govern SQL engineering standards covering builds, configuration, database design, storage, security, resilience, backup, monitoring and support, establishing standard build patterns and reusable engineering practices.
• Develop and maintain the technical roadmap for the SQL estate, proactively addressing lifecycle risk, technical debt, end-of-life technology and opportunities to simplify, consolidate and modernise.
• Proactively monitor and optimise SQL Server performance across databases, queries, indexing, memory, CPU, storage and I/O, while managing capacity, growth trends and future requirements.
• Own SQL backup, restore and recovery requirements, including retention, recoverability and routine validation, and define and test recovery procedures aligned with application recovery objectives and business continuity requirements, including disaster recovery exercises.
• Ensure SQL services are secure and compliant with PL Re and Pacific Life Technology Risk requirements, including patching, vulnerability remediation, hardening, role-based access, least privilege, service accounts, privileged access and appropriate audit evidence.
• Develop proactive monitoring, alerting and service-health measures covering availability, performance, capacity, backups and other critical database indicators.
• Provide advanced technical support for complex SQL incidents and problems, leading root-cause analysis and driving permanent remediation for significant or recurring issues.
• Provide SQL engineering expertise to infrastructure and application initiatives from initial design through implementation and transition to BAU, including migrations, upgrades, platform refreshes and major releases.
• Work closely with Infrastructure Engineering on compute, storage, networking, backup, monitoring and other platform dependencies, including technical validation before and after significant changes.
• Partner with actuarial, pricing, research, operational, application and data teams to translate database requirements into secure, resilient, performant and supportable…