Senior SQL BDA

An well known insurance client is looking for a SQL Server DBA to join their team in Sandton, GP who can take ownership of mission critical SQL Server platforms across production, UAT, development, and disaster recovery environments. This is a hands on role focused on performance, availability, reliability, security, encryption, backup and recovery, high availability, log shipping, partitioning, automation, and deep troubleshooting with developers and infrastructure teams.

The SQL Server DBA will be responsible for the implementation, configuration, maintenance, performance, security, and availability of critical SQL Server database platforms. The successful candidate must be able to operate as an escalation point, work with developers on complex performance and application issues, maintain strong disaster recovery readiness, and ensure the database estate remains secure, recoverable, compliant, and well documented.

• Manage SQL Server databases through all lifecycle environments (development, UAT, production).
• Install, configure, maintain, patch, and upgrade SQL Server instances and related components.
• Configure and maintain SQL Server services, Agent jobs, maintenance plans, linked servers, operators, alerts, and database mail.
• Monitor SQL Server health, performance, capacity, availability, storage, jobs, backups, and replication.
• Investigate and resolve production incidents, service outages, performance degradation, blocking, deadlocks, and corruption risks.
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks, inventory, and change records.
• Participate in planned maintenance windows, after-hours support, release deployments, and on‑call rotations.

• Design, configure, maintain, and troubleshoot HA/DR solutions (Always On Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances, replication, log shipping).
• Monitor and validate HA components (replicas, listeners, quorum, failover behavior, synchronization health).
• Maintain log shipping configuration, backup copy schedules, and failover readiness.
• Perform DR testing, failover validation, and recovery validation.
• Define and support RPO and RTO objectives in partnership with business and risk teams.
• Maintain documented recovery procedures for restore, failover, and rollback scenarios.
• Ensure production and DR environments remain aligned (logins, permissions, jobs, etc.).

• Design and maintain backup strategies (full, differential, transaction log, copy‑only).
• Maintain transaction log backup frequency and retention aligned to business requirements.
• Perform regular restore tests to validate backup integrity and recoverability.
• Troubleshoot backup/restore failures, including VSS/application‑aware backup issues.
• Work with enterprise backup platforms (e.g., Veeam) for application‑aware backups.
• Maintain restore procedures for same‑server, alternate‑server, point‑in‑time, and object‑level recovery.
• Ensure monitoring alerts clearly identify failed or missed backups.

• Assist developers with complex query tuning, indexing strategy, and execution plan analysis.
• Troubleshoot blocking, deadlocks, wait statistics, parameter sniffing, and memory/CPU pressure.
• Use native SQL Server tools to identify performance bottlenecks and root causes.
• Review inefficient queries, missing indexes, fragmentation, and high‑cost workloads.
• Isolate issues (database, code, infrastructure, storage, network, or external dependencies).
• Support release deployments with impact assessment, rollback planning, and validation.
• Promote database design standards that improve performance and scalability.

• Design, maintain, and troubleshoot table partitioning strategies for large/high‑growth databases.
• Implement and maintain partition functions, schemes, indexes, and staging tables.
• Automate partition management (rolling window, archive movement, compression, cleanup).
• Work with teams to define data retention, archive, and purge…