Database Engineer - Oracle and SQL Server (m/f/d)

Description

About the Role

Not every Sofico customer runs on Sofico Cloud. A large part of the database estate is standalone: Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server instances on virtual machines, in Sofico's own datacenter and on IaaS VMs in Azure and OCI, serving hosted customers and customer-specific setups. Sofico's applications are deployed on either engine depending on the customer, so this estate is mixed by design.

This position owns that estate day to day. You build new database servers, keep existing ones patched, backed up and performing, and turn the way that is done into a repeatable, automated standard — so that a new customer database becomes a pipeline run rather than a week of manual work.

As a Database Engineer , you will join the Platform Infrastructure Team , the group responsible for the foundation on which all Sofico products and services run.

The Platform Infrastructure Team manages the core infrastructure that powers the company, including datacenters, cloud platforms, network security, identity services, and infrastructure-as-code solutions. By ensuring these critical systems remain secure, reliable, and scalable, the team enables engineering teams across Sofico to build, deploy, and operate applications with confidence.

In your role, you will contribute to the design, maintenance, and optimization of our database platforms, helping to guarantee performance, availability, and security at scale. Working closely with infrastructure and product teams, you will play a key role in supporting the growth of Sofico's cloud and on-premises environments while maintaining high standards of governance and operational excellence. You work independently, from an instance request through to its handover into operations.

Responsibilities

• Deploy Oracle and SQL Server instances on virtual machines end to end: OS preparation (Linux / RHEL, Windows Server), storage and filesystem layout, installation, configuration, hardening and handover to operations.
• Turn those builds into standard, automated templates with Ansible — and Terraform for the IaaS VMs — so every instance of the same type is built the same way.
• Patch and upgrade on a planned cycle: Oracle Release Updates and SQL Server cumulative updates, plus version upgrades (for example Oracle 19c to 26ai, older SQL Server releases to 2022 or 2025) with a tested rollback path.
• Backup and recovery: RMAN and SQL Server backups, retention, off-site and immutable copies, and scheduled restore tests — a backup that has never been restored does not count.
• High availability and disaster recovery for standalone setups: Oracle Data Guard, SQL Server Always On availability groups or log shipping, matched to what each customer's service level requires and its licence allows.
• Daily operations: monitoring in Zabbix, capacity and space management, job failures, performance troubleshooting, and the database side of hosting incidents.
• Security and compliance: access management, patch compliance, encryption (TDE) and auditing where customers require it, and the evidence that financial-sector customer audits ask for.
• Licence hygiene: keep an accurate record of edition, cores and options in use on every VM — virtualisation directly affects how Oracle and SQL Server are licensed — and raise cost or compliance risks early.
• Database migrations between the datacenter, IaaS and Sofico Cloud when customers move: Data Pump, RMAN, SQL Server backup/restore and their cut-over plans.
• Write and maintain the runbooks for everything above, and take part in the Database and Performance on-call rota.
• What you bring
• Three to five years of hands-on production experience as a DBA or database engineer, with real working experience in both Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server — deep in one, solid in the other and willing to grow it.
• Oracle: installation and patching (OPatch, Release Updates), multitenant (CDB/PDB), RMAN, Data Pump, Data Guard, and performance analysis with AWR/ASH and execution plans.
• SQL Server: installation and configuration on Windows Server, recovery models and backup/restore, Always On availability groups, SQL Server Agent, and troubleshooting with Query Store and wait statistics.
• Administrator-level Linux and Windows Server, including storage and filesystem design for databases on virtual machines.
• Scripting in Bash and PowerShell alongside SQL, PL/SQL and T-SQL; Ansible experience, or a clear drive to automate repeated work (Terraform is a plus).
• Experience with virtualised infrastructure (VMware or similar) and/or IaaS virtual machines in Azure or OCI.
• Methodical and change-managed: you plan, document and announce changes on production databases rather than improvise them.
• Awareness of Oracle and SQL Server licensing on virtualised infrastructure is a strong plus; Oracle or Microsoft certifications are welcome, demonstrated practice matters more.
• Fluent English; with participation in an on-call rota.