About Planet
Planet is a global provider of integrated technology and payments solutions for retail and hospitality customers.
We create great experiences for the millions of people who use our payments, software, and tax-free solutions every minute of every day.
Planet empowers its customers to deliver great customer experiences by combining payments and software in ways that drive greater loyalty, increase revenue and save time.
Founded over 35 years ago and with our headquarters in London, today we have more than 2,500 employees located across six continents serving our customers in more than 120 markets.
Role Overview
We are seeking a highly skilled Azure SQL Database Administrator to join our Cloud & Infrastructure Services team. The role is primarily responsible for operating and optimising Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance as managed database services, supporting critical business applications across production and non-production environments.
The successful candidate will own service configuration, reliability, performance, security, cost efficiency, monitoring, backup and recovery, business continuity, and lifecycle governance for the Azure SQL estate. The role will exploit platform-managed capabilities such as automated patching, backups, built-in high availability, elastic scaling, and intelligent performance features, while retaining strong SQL Server expertise for compatibility assessment, migration, troubleshooting, and workload optimisation.
Previous experience working within regulated industries (e.g., payments, financial services, PCI-DSS, healthcare, or other compliance-driven environments) is highly desirable.
What you will do
- Administer, maintain, and support Azure SQL Database, elastic pools, and Azure SQL Managed Instance across production and non-production environments.
- Select and right-size deployment models, service tiers, compute models, storage, and scaling options according to workload, availability, latency, and cost requirements.
- Implement business continuity using zone redundancy, automated backups, point-in-time restore, long-term retention, active geo-replication, and failover groups as appropriate.
- Monitor database health and performance using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Query Store, Query Performance Insight, dynamic management views, and enterprise observability tooling.
- Troubleshoot and optimise queries, indexes, execution plans, resource contention, blocking, deadlocks, storage, and connectivity.
- Secure services through Microsoft Entra authentication, managed identities, least-privilege access, private endpoints, network controls, encryption, auditing, vulnerability assessment, and Microsoft Defender for SQL.
- Plan and deliver migrations from SQL Server to Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance, including discovery, compatibility assessment, remediation, cutover, validation, and rollback planning.
- Drive cost optimisation through capacity reviews, reservations, Azure Hybrid Benefit where applicable, elastic pools, serverless configurations, and workload right-sizing.
- Collaborate with application, security, network, platform engineering, and service teams on database design, connectivity, deployment pipelines, reliability, and production readiness.
- Ensure compliance with security, audit, data-retention, and regulatory requirements, including PCI DSS controls.
- Maintain service standards, technical documentation, migration patterns, operational procedures, and recovery runbooks.
Who you are
- Strong hands-on experience administering Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance in production.
- Strong understanding of Azure SQL deployment models, logical servers, managed instances, elastic pools, vCore purchasing, General Purpose, Business Critical, Hyperscale, and serverless options.
- Experience designing high availability and disaster recovery with zone redundancy, failover groups, active geo-replication, automated backups, point-in-time restore, and long-term retention.
- Strong SQL Server engine knowledge, including T-SQL, Query Store, execution plans, indexing, statistics, blocking, deadlocks, and query optimisation.
- Experience with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, diagnostic settings, alerts, and observability platforms such as Coralogix, Datadog, or Grafana.
- Knowledge of Microsoft Entra authentication, managed identities, Azure RBAC, database permissions, encryption, auditing, private endpoints, Private DNS, firewalls, and connectivity troubleshooting.
- Experience assessing and migrating SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance, including compatibility and cutover planning.
- Experience operating production-critical database services and participating in incident, problem, change, and capacity management.
- Good understanding of PaaS shared-responsibility boundaries and the operational differences between Azure SQL services and self-managed SQL Server.
On-Call Requirements
This position supports business-critical production services. Participation in an on-call rotation is expected and candidates must be willing to provide out-of-hours support when required for incidents, maintenance activities, and service restorations.
Why Planet:
Planet is an equal opportunity employer where diversity is valued, and all employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need.
Come and grow your career in the most exciting, fast paced technology market, with a business that delivers feel-good connected commerce.
We would love to hear from you – Apply now.
At Planet, we embrace a hybrid work model, with three days a week in the office.
Reasonable accommodations may be made in order to allow for an individual to perform the essential functions of this role successfully.