Senior Database Engineer

Join to apply for the Senior Database Engineer role at Auto Nation

Position Summary

This position is for a highly skilled and forward-thinking Senior Database Engineer to lead the modernization, automation, and optimization of our enterprise data platform. This role blends deep expertise in database administration, development, and automation engineering, with a strong focus on high-availability and disaster recovery, AWS and Azure data services, data replication technologies, and database Dev Ops. The ideal candidate will drive innovation in database performance, scalability, security, and automation/self‑service enabling a resilient and high‑performing data ecosystem across on‑premises and hybrid cloud environments.

This position is remote.

At this time, we are not considering applicants who require employment authorization sponsorship (1) as a condition of eligibility for employment with the Company or (2) at any point during the term of their employment. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future visa sponsorship by the Company.

Key Responsibilities

• Engineer, deploy, manage, and optimize SQL Server environments including Failover Cluster Instances (FCI), Always‑On Availability Groups (AG), performance tuning, indexing strategy, data lifecycle, patching, capacity planning, and HA/DR design.
• Engineer and support AWS database services including Aurora Postgres, Aurora MySQL, Dynamo
  
  DB, RDS, and S3‑based data architectures.
• Administer and optimize Snowflake compute/storage usage, governance, performance, and cost controls.
• Implement enterprise‑grade backup, restore, replication, and cross‑region disaster recovery strategies across SQL Server, Aurora, Snowflake, and other platforms.

• Drive modernization from legacy state to cloud‑optimized, event‑driven, automated database patterns.
• Leverage infrastructure‑as‑code, CI/CD, and declarative database automation (DB Dev Ops).
• Automate provisioning, patching, scaling, DR failovers, and schema deployments.
• Implement platform‑wide observability, monitoring, and telemetry to detect anomalies and prevent incidents before impact.

• Lead proactive performance engineering including query tuning, index optimization, resource controls, workload management, execution plan analysis, monitoring, and right‑sizing.
• Partner with development teams to shift‑left performance earlier into the SDLC.

• Implement least privilege, identity‑based access, audit controls, encryption, secrets management, and data protection controls.
• Ensure compliance with corporate policies, regulatory expectations, and secure architecture patterns.
• Identify platform risk, drive remediation plans, prevent platform drift.

• Mentor platform engineering / data engineering teams and elevate organizational database engineering capability.
• Influence roadmap direction, introduce new platform capabilities, challenge status‑quo thinking.
• Partner with product, cloud, platform, data, and application teams to drive engineering excellence.

Required Skills & Experience

• 7+ years hands‑on experience with enterprise databases at scale (10TB+ preferred)
• Expert‑level SQL Server engineering (FCI, Always‑On Availability Groups, Extended Events, Query Store, backup/restore)
• Strong in AWS data services (Aurora, RDS SQL Server, Dynamo
  
  DB, S3, DMS/HVR)
• Hands‑on experience with Snowflake architecture, cost/perf optimization, workload management
• Advanced database performance tuning (execution plans, indexing, concurrency, storage engine internals)
• Proficiency in Power Shell and Python automation
• Deep understanding of database security (RBAC, IAM integration, encryption, secrets management, network boundary controls)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or Cloud Formation) and modern CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with SSIS, SSRS and data movement/ETL modernization patterns
• Demonstrated ability to influence architecture direction and platform engineering strategy

Preferred

• Experience with Dev Ops/Data Ops concepts and automation tooling (Liquibase / Flyway /…