Senior Database Reliability Engineer

Perch are recruiting for a Senior Database Reliability Engineer.

At Perch Group, our vision is clear: to lead the UK debt purchase and collection industry by harnessing cutting-edge technology to drive ethical, efficient, and data-driven debt resolution.

Our annual mission is to empower hundreds of thousands of customers to positively engage with and resolve their outstanding debts. We do this through an empathetic and customer-centric approach that is at the heart of our success.

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior Database Reliability Engineer (DBRE) to help drive the reliability, performance, security, and operational excellence of our enterprise data estate.

This role combines deep SQL Server DBA expertise with modern reliability engineering practices. You will be responsible for ensuring our database platforms remain resilient, scalable, performant, and secure while supporting critical business systems and data services.

We're looking for someone who goes beyond traditional database administration. You should be passionate about automation, proactive monitoring, disaster recovery, platform optimisation, and building highly reliable database services that can scale with the needs of the organisation.

• Manage and maintain SQL Server environments, ensuring high availability, performance, and reliability.
• Implement proactive monitoring, alerting, and health checks across database platforms.
• Lead root-cause analysis and resolution of database incidents and performance issues.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives focused on platform stability, resilience, and operational efficiency.
• Establish and maintain database reliability standards, operational runbooks, and support procedures.

• Administer SQL Server environments including installation, configuration, patching, upgrades, and maintenance.
• Manage backup, recovery, high-availability, and disaster recovery solutions.
• Monitor and optimise database performance, storage, indexing strategies, and resource utilisation.
• Manage security, permissions, encryption, and compliance requirements.
• Support capacity planning and future platform growth.
• Administer and optimise Azure-based database services.
• Monitor Azure SQL environments, performance metrics, costs, and utilisation.
• Support cloud migration, modernisation, and optimisation initiatives.
• Implement best practices for security, resilience, monitoring, and operational support across Azure database services.
• Develop automation solutions using T-SQL, scripting, and tooling to reduce operational overhead.
• Improve deployment, monitoring, patching, and maintenance processes through automation.
• Collaborate with Data Engineers, Architects, and Infrastructure teams to improve platform reliability.
• Support Dev Ops and Infrastructure-as-Code initiatives where appropriate.

• 5+ years advanced T-SQL development experience, including performance tuning, query optimisation, indexing strategies, stored procedure development, troubleshooting complex database workloads, dynamic SQL patterns.
• 5+ years SQL Server DBA administration experience, including installation and configuration, backup and recovery, high availability / disaster recovery, performance monitoring and tuning, security and permissions management, capacity planning and maintenance.
• 3+ years Azure database management experience, including one or more of Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, Azure VM-hosted SQL Server, Azure monitoring and performance management.
• Experience with Always On Availability Groups.
• Exposure to Azure monitoring and observability tooling.
• Power Shell scripting and automation.
• Experience with Azure Dev Ops and CI/CD practices.
• Understanding of data warehousing platforms and large-scale analytical workloads.
• Experience working in regulated industries such as financial services, debt recovery, insurance, or utilities.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and cloud platform engineering principles.

• A first stage video call with the internal recruitment team…