Senior Database Performance & Benchmark Engineer

Job description

Senior Database Performance & Benchmark Engineer, the responsible for designing and executing rigorous testing strategies across a complex hybrid environment consisting of large-scale on-premises SQL Server instances and public cloud managed database services. You will act as the bridge between infrastructure engineering, database administration, and application development to ensure our systems are resilient, highly scalable, and optimized for peak production workloads.

Responsibilities

Hybrid Benchmarking & Load Testing

Design, script, and execute comprehensive load, stress, and endurance tests utilizing synthetic tools (e.g., HammerDB, OStress, Apache JMeter) and production replay tools (e.g., WorkloadTools, DEA).

Performance Telemetry & Monitoring

Establish performance baselines and build continuous monitoring dashboards utilizing OS-level metrics (PerfMon/Linux Sysstat) and SQL Server Dynamic Management Views (DMVs).

Cloud Migration & Scaling Validation

Benchmark on-premises workloads and simulate equivalent performance in public cloud environments (such as AWS RDS/EC2, Azure SQL, or GCP Cloud SQL) to accurately size cloud infrastructure and control costs.

Bottleneck Isolation & Optimization

Analyze execution plans, identify plan regressions, and isolate resource contention bottlenecks (CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, TempDB, and network latency).

Concurrency & Lock Management

Diagnose and resolve complex locking, blocking, and deadlock scenarios discovered during high-concurrency simulation cycles.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Partner with Performance QA, DevOps, Infrastructure, and Application teams to establish quality gates and provide actionable code/indexing optimization recommendations.

Qualifications

Must-Have

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent with 7+ years of experience in dedicated database administration (DBA), database engineering, or specialized database performance testing experience.

Hybrid Environment Mastery

Proven track record managing or benchmarking both traditional on-premises enterprise hardware and public cloud architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

Deep SQL Server Internals

Expert-level knowledge of SQL Server query optimization, execution plan analysis, Query Store, Extended Events (XEvents), and system DMVs and Extensive experience setting up and operating database benchmarking suites such as HammerDB, SQLQueryStress, OStress, or similar automated simulation frameworks. Solid understanding of underlying storage configurations (SAN, NVMe, Cloud IOPS allocations), virtualization layers, and network latency mechanics in hybrid setups and Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in PowerShell, T-SQL, or Python to automate test deployments, data generation, and telemetry collection.

Experience with cloud native infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform) to spin up and tear down transient performance testing sandboxes and Experience with production workload masking and synchronization methodologies to generate high-fidelity, non-sensitive testing datasets.

Nice-To-Have

Relevant certifications such as Azure Database Administrator Associate or historical Microsoft SQL Server certifications.