Senior SQL Server DBA | On-Premise | Migration

Senior SQL Server Database Administrator

On-Premise | Migration & Platform Support

Role

Senior SQL Server Database Administrator (On-Premise)

Experience

5 to 10 years

Location

Jaipur, Noida, Pune, Hyderabad, Bengaluru

Engagement

Client-facing, on-premise SQL Server migration and platform support

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior SQL Server DBA to take ownership of a large, complex on-premise SQL Server estate for an enterprise client. This is a hands-on, production-facing role weighted toward server migration and platform support, alongside day-to-day operational ownership not a monitoring-only position.

The estate comprises multiple clustered SQL Server instances, including a production environment distributed across three servers with a separate disaster recovery setup and a one-to-one development clone. It carries 400+ SSIS jobs, 35+ SSAS cubes and extensive SSRS usage, feeding a large downstream reporting community.

You will be the person accountable for keeping this estate healthy, resolving the issues it produces, and moving it safely.

Key Responsibilities

Migration & Modernisation

• Plan and execute SQL Server migrations across multi-server and clustered topologies, covering assessment, inventory, cutover and hypercare
• Own the full migration checkpoint set — logins with SIDs, SSISDB and its master key, SSRS encryption keys, Agent jobs, proxies, linked servers, SSAS cubes and downstream connection dependencies
• Design parallel-run and reconciliation approaches, define rollback criteria in advance, and validate post-migration performance against pre-migration baselines
• Handle legacy artefacts where original owners, credentials and documentation are no longer available

Daily Server Health Check & Maintenance

• Perform structured daily health checks across all instances: service and Agent status, database state, failed and long-running jobs, backup success, free space across data, log, tempdb and backup volumes, blocking sessions and error log review
• Monitor job duration against normal bands and investigate anomalies before they become failures
• Verify downstream data currency for priority reporting assets, including detection of jobs that succeed while loading stale or partial data
• Own scheduled maintenance: threshold-driven index and statistics maintenance within agreed windows, integrity checks, msdb and SSISDB history cleanup, and log file management
• Produce and circulate a daily health summary, and progressively automate routine checks into a single consolidated report
• Track capacity and growth trends — file growth, drive consumption and batch window drift — and forecast constraints ahead of impact

Access Management & User Support

• Manage the access request queue end to end across the database engine, SSAS cubes and SSRS — grant, modify and revoke within agreed SLAs
• Administer permissions through Active Directory groups rather than individual logins, maintaining an accurate access register
• Resolve access-related incidents: login failures, orphaned users after restores, permission escalation requests, service account and credential expiry, and job owner validation errors
• Maintain a central service account register covering owner, expiry date and dependent objects, with proactive expiry alerting
• Conduct periodic permission audits, remove leavers and privilege creep, and respond to audit and compliance queries on who has access to what
• Act as first point of contact for user-reported database and reporting access issues, with clear communication and turnaround

Database Administration

• Own backup and recovery: strategy design, verification, corruption handling and periodic timed restore drills against agreed RTO and RPO
• Manage instance configuration, index and statistics strategy, integrity checks and capacity planning
• Diagnose and resolve production incidents — blocking chains, transaction log exhaustion, tempdb contention, storage latency and query regression
• Establish monitoring baselines and alerting where none currently exist

Platform Services — SSIS, SSAS, SSRS

• Administer and support Integration, Analysis and Reporting Services: deployment, configuration, security, cube processing and subscription management
• Manage the SQL Server Agent job estate — ownership standards, proxy accounts, scheduling, dependency chains and failure triage

High Availability & Disaster Recovery

• Maintain and test clustering and DR configurations, including scheduled failover testing
• Own the DR runbook and document explicitly what falls outside high-availability coverage

Change & Infrastructure Coordination

• Represent the database platform during Windows patching and infrastructure change windows — pre-checks, controlled service sequencing, post-change validation and pipeline catch-up
• Work with infrastructure, OS, storage and Active Directory teams, and escalate to vendor support with a supporting evidence pack

Stakeholder Engagement

• Communicate incident status and business impact in plain language, on a predictable cadence
• Author root cause analyses and maintain runbooks, access registers and platform documentation

Required Skills & Experience

Essential

• 6+ years administering production SQL Server, with demonstrable ownership rather than shared support
• Proven end-to-end server migration experience on a multi-database estate, with specific examples
• Strong backup and recovery capability — restore sequencing, corruption diagnosis, DBCC CHECKDB, RESTORE VERIFYONLY, and experience of real recovery scenarios
• Established daily operational discipline — able to describe their own health check routine and what they automated
• Practical experience resolving access issues across all three security models: engine logins and database roles, SSAS role-based cube security, and SSRS item-level permissions
• Understanding of orphaned users, SID mismatches and service account lifecycle management
• Hands-on SSIS administration: deployment models, SSISDB, protection levels, parameterisation and job troubleshooting
• Working knowledge of SSAS (including cube security and processing) and SSRS (including encryption keys and subscriptions)
• Performance diagnosis using wait statistics and DMVs — able to distinguish platform-bound from code-bound problems
• Clustering and/or Always On experience, including having performed a real failover
• Experience coordinating with infrastructure teams through patching and change windows
• Clear written and verbal communication in a client-facing setting

Desirable

• Multi-source ETL integration experience across cloud storage, relational and SaaS sources
• SAP-sourced data warehouse exposure
• PostgreSQL or other non-SQL Server platform familiarity
• Partitioning strategy and large-table retention management
• Monitoring tooling and baseline instrumentation
• Experience implementing group managed service accounts (gMSAs) or automated credential rotation
• Microsoft certification — Azure Database Administrator Associate or equivalent

What Will Set a Candidate Apart

• Has migrated an estate where the original developers had left and the documentation did not exist
• Can describe a production incident they diagnosed against resistance, and how they built the evidence
• Has replaced a manual morning routine with an automated health report, and can explain what they chose to alert on and why
• Treats monitoring baselines as a prerequisite rather than a nice-to-have
• Knows what a high-availability configuration does not protect