Principal Database Administrator Fully Remote

£80k-£90k | Fully remote | Permanent, full-time | Platform / Engineering
We're hiring a Principal DBA to lead and hands-on-run a 300+ production database estate—predominantly SQL Server on Azure, with a growing Cosmos DB footprint—supporting a market-leading SaaS platform 24x7.
This is a true player-coach role: you'll set the long-term database strategy and standards, improve reliability, performance, and security across the estate, and line-manage and develop our existing DBA team. You'll be the senior technical authority for database architecture, risk, and operations.
What you'll do

• Own the strategy, standards, and roadmap for the database function across SQL Server, Azure SQL, and Cosmos DB.
• Get hands-on with a live production estate: performance tuning, configuration, backups, restores, disaster recovery, incident response, and release support.
• Right-size and optimise Azure SQL deployments across General Purpose, Business Critical, and Hyperscale—balancing performance, availability, and cost.
• Replace manual, undocumented changes with repeatable, auditable, well-monitored processes.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a small DBA team.
• Shape our emerging data platform direction, including Cosmos DB, Snowflake, and Azure Data Factory.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years' hands-on SQL Server DBA experience, including deep performance tuning, indexing, execution...