Lead Database Platform Engineer | Snowflake

Location

Minnetonka, MN or Madison, WI | Hybrid;
Tuesday - Thursday

Contract-to-Hire

$50 - $80 p/h DOE

We are partnering with a large, mission-driven organization in the healthcare and health insurance space to hire a Lead Database Platform Engineer. This is a senior-level platform engineering role focused on building, automating, and operating enterprise database platforms  position emphasizes ownership, technical leadership, and enablement rather than ticket-based execution or pure individual contribution.

This role is not early-career and is not a pure hands-on IC role. The ideal candidate brings deep technical credibility, operates comfortably in ambiguous environments, and is motivated to expand leadership scope over time by influencing standards, practices, and team capability.

The Lead Database Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, automating, and operating enterprise database platforms with a strong focus on reliability, scalability, resiliency, and delivery enablement.

This role supports Snowflake as the primary analytics database platform while also enabling broader enterprise platforms including Postgre

SQL, Cosmos DB, Oracle, and SQL Server
. The position is centered on platform engineering
, not analytics delivery, and partners closely with cloud engineering, Dev Ops, security, and application teams to provide consistent, self-service database capabilities across development pipelines in an Azure cloud environment
.

As a technical leader, this role plays a key part in transforming the database function into a CI/CD-enabled database platform team
, driving adoption through standards, automation, documentation, and collaboration.

• Design, implement, and evolve Snowflake account, environment, and workload architectures aligned with defined platform standards.
• Support enterprise database platforms (Cosmos DB, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgre
  
  SQL) using shared automation patterns and operational practices.
• Define and enforce database platform standards for reliability, performance, scalability, and maintainability.

• Own and evolve CI/CD patterns for database platforms to enable safe, repeatable, and automated delivery across environments.
• Design and implement infrastructure-as-code and database change automation using tools such as Terraform, Liquibase, and Git-based workflows.
• Automate environment provisioning, onboarding, and access workflows to reduce manual effort and delivery friction.
• Ensure consistency across development, test, and production environments.

• Partner with cloud engineering teams to integrate database platforms with Azure networking, identity, and security architectures.
• Support cloud-first and hybrid database deployment models aligned with enterprise standards.
• Enable secure and scalable connectivity between database platforms, applications, and downstream data services.

• Implement replication, failover, and recovery patterns to meet defined recovery objectives.
• Develop and maintain disaster recovery runbooks, validation procedures, and testing practices.
• Participate in resiliency testing and continuous improvement of recovery strategies.

• Implement monitoring, alerting, and operational visibility for performance, capacity, and cost usage.
• Support incident response and root cause analysis for database platform issues.
• Reduce operational toil through automation and improved platform standards.
• Document operational patterns, runbooks, and platform requirements.

• Act as a technical lead influencing database platform direction and adoption across teams.
• Partner with application, data, cloud, and security teams to remove delivery bottlenecks.
• Mentor engineers and database administrators through standards, documentation, guidance, and hands-on support.
• Enable team members to operate as Dev Ops-oriented database practitioners within delivery teams.

• Extensive hands-on experience operating enterprise database platforms in production environments.
• Strong experience with Snowflake and at least one of the following:
  Oracle, SQL Server, Postgre
  
  SQL.
• Proven experience designing, building, and owning CI/CD pipelines for database or infrastructure platforms.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code, automation, and Git-based workflows.
• Experience integrating database platforms within Azure environments, including networking, identity, and security services.
• Strong understanding of role-based access control (RBAC), security models, and least-privilege design.
• Demonstrated ability to lead platform changes across teams and operate effectively in environments with ambiguity and cross-team dependencies.
• A strong ownership mindset, focusing on outcomes, enablement, and reliability rather than ticket-based execution.
• Ability to clearly explain architectural decisions to both technical and…