Company Description
At TOPdesk, our Azure SQL estate is a critical part of how we deliver a reliable SaaS platform to more than 10 million users worldwide. As our platform evolves, we’re looking for a senior Database Administrator with deep Azure SQL expertise to help us manage performance, scalability, and cost in a more structural and proactive way.
Job Description
This is not a traditional, ticket-driven DBA role focused on break-fix support. The role exists to help TOPdesk move from reactive optimisation and outlier hunting toward long-term ownership of the Azure SQL estate.
We opened this role because Azure SQL is a material part of TOPdesk's hosting cost and the foundation of customer-facing performance, and we're at a point in our platform evolution where reactive optimisation isn't enough. We're actively decomposing a long-tenured Java/MS SQL monolith into microservices, and we need deep database expertise embedded in that journey, not called in after incidents.You’ll work closely with platform engineering and development teams while we continue decomposing a long-standing Java and Microsoft SQL monolith into microservices. The goal is to ensure the data layer remains a strength throughout that transition — not a constraint.
Your mission
Azure SQL represents a significant part of TOPdesk’s hosting cost and plays a major role in application performance for our customers. Today, a large part of our optimisation work happens after incidents or escalations. We want to get ahead of that.
Your mission is to bring deep database performance engineering expertise into TOPdesk and help create a structurally healthy Azure SQL environment: performant, observable, scalable, and cost-efficient.
You’ll combine performance engineering, governance, and developer enablement to improve how we operate and evolve our database landscape.
What you will own
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Cost management and resource optimisation. Identify the inefficiencies — noisy neighbours, abusive API usage, sub-optimal resource allocation — that drive Azure SQL cost, and implement structural savings.
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Performance engineering. Structurally monitor query response times and execution plans so the application stays snappy as data volume grows. Index hygiene is a core part of the role: remove redundant or sub-optimal indexes; add smarter ones to support heavy API traffic.
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Observability and accountability. Implement query tagging and advanced monitoring so the business can see which services and customers are driving load and cost on the database.
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Developer enablement. Act as a specialist who advises engineering teams, helps them own their data solutions well, and prevents data-layer technical debt from accumulating across new microservices.
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Governance. Move us toward a model where domain teams maintain strong control and integrity over their data with deep DBA partnership — reducing reliance on ad-hoc, externally-run queries against production.
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Target architecture contribution. Help shape decisions on sharding strategies, multi-tenancy models, and event-driven decomposition to reduce database load over time.
How you approach the work
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Work the estate structurally — patterns and policy, not just individual outliers.
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Measure before optimising. Baselines and dashboards before opinions.
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Consultative, not gatekeeping. Pair with engineering teams; transfer knowledge as you go.
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Treat cost and performance as joint objectives wherever possible, not a forced trade-off.
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Make governance part of the craft, not an afterthought.
Technical environment
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Primary database estate: Azure SQL (Managed Instances) and related flavours; elastic pools; multi-tenant SaaS.
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Application layer: Java monolith being decomposed into microservices. Jooq, JPA, and custom persistence frameworks in active use.
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Broader engineering stack (context): Python, TypeScript, Vue, Postgres, Azure; Terraform-managed infrastructure. Your primary focus is Azure SQL.
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Scale: 10M+ SaaS users; a complex, hybrid SaaS estate with significant per-tenant variability.
What success looks like after 12 months
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A documented baseline of Azure SQL cost, performance, and tenant-impact metrics — and measurable improvement against it.
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An index-hygiene programme delivered: redundant indexes removed, smarter indexes added for the hottest API paths.
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Query tagging and observability in place. Cost-per-service and cost-per-tenant attribution visible to product and platform teams.
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Noisy-neighbour and abusive-usage patterns identified, surfaced, and addressed at the source.
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Clear contribution to target-architecture decisions — sharding, multi-tenancy model, event-driven decomposition — informed by the actual estate, not by abstraction.
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Engineering teams routinely consult you during design, not only after incidents.
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External-consultant dependency for database work materially reduced.
Qualifications
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At least 5 years of hands-on experience as a Database Administrator, Database Engineer, or Performance Specialist in Microsoft SQL Server environments
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Deep, current expertise in Microsoft SQL Server, specifically Azure SQL (Managed Instances) and related flavours.
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Proven track record on performance tuning at API scale: index optimisation, execution plan analysis, query tuning, locking and concurrency.
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Strong on Azure SQL elastic pools, resource sharing, and noisy-neighbour management in multi-tenant SaaS.
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Comfortable advising on multi-tenancy patterns — single database with multiple schemas versus database-per-tenant — and the trade-offs each carries.
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Experience working with and around ORMs and abstraction layers: Jooq, JPA, custom persistence frameworks.
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Has operated in an environment where a long-tenured monolith is being decomposed into microservices, with the data-layer complexity that brings.
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Consultative communicator. Bridges naturally between “spot the inefficiency” and “ship the code-level fix” alongside engineering teams.
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Strategic enough to contribute to target-architecture discussions on sharding, streaming, and decomposition.
What we look for
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This is a structural ownership role, not a break-fix support function. If you want a mandate to work at the pattern and policy level — not just respond to incidents — that's exactly what this is. Structural thinker — looks for patterns and policy, not just individual outliers.
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Treats cost and performance as joint objectives rather than a forced trade-off.
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Pragmatic operator; comfortable in production and with production risk.
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Communicates database concerns clearly to non-specialists.
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Coach as much as fixer.
This role is based at our Delft head office (minimum 3 days per week). Given the close partnership with platform engineering and the teams driving the monolith decomposition, regular co-location is genuinely important, not a formality.
Additional Information
Interested?
We look forward to receiving your CV.
