Database Engineer- SQL Server

Visa•Austin, TX

8d•$110,700 - $171,800•Hybrid

About The Position

Visa is a world leader in payments technology, facilitating transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories, dedicated to uplifting everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid. At Visa, you’ll have the opportunity to create impact at scale — tackling meaningful challenges, growing your skills and seeing your contributions impact lives around the world. Join Visa and do work that matters – to you, to your community, and to the world. Progress starts with you. The Opportunity: We are seeking a SQL Server Database Engineer with a strong focus on production operations and reliability engineering (SRE). As part of this team, you will contribute to the plan, build, and run of Microsoft SQL Server database infrastructure, with a primary focus on system reliability, performance, and operational excellence. This is a hands-on Microsoft SQL Server role requiring strong T-SQL and PowerShell skills, with an emphasis on production support, automation, and performance tuning. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys owning production database environments, solving real-time issues, and improving system stability through automation, observability, and proactive performance optimization. You will play a key role in ensuring databases are highly available, resilient, and operating at scale-rather than building analytics platforms or data pipelines. You’ll work both independently and collaboratively to deliver database improvements, troubleshoot complex issues, and support critical production systems, while applying best practices in SQL Server administration, automation, and reliability engineering.

Requirements

2+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 5+ years of relevant work experience
2–5 years of hands-on experience with Microsoft SQL Server in production environments
Strong experience with: T-SQL (query tuning, stored procedures, performance troubleshooting)
PowerShell scripting for automation and operational tasks
SQL Server performance tuning (indexing, execution plans)
Experience supporting production systems or on-call environments
Experience with backup/recovery and database maintenance
Strong problem-solving skills in live operational scenarios

Nice To Haves

Experience with automation platforms (e.g., Ansible)
Observability experience (Clickhouse, Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, etc.)
Exposure to SQL Server HA/DR (Always On, replication, clustering)
Experience in SRE, DevOps, or operations-focused roles
Cloud exposure (AWS or GCP)
Familiarity with Git/GitHub
Experience leveraging AI/code assistant tools for troubleshooting or automation

Responsibilities

Own the health, stability, and reliability of SQL Server production environments.
Continuously improve availability, monitoring, alerting, and incident response practices.
Diagnose and resolve real-world production issues including slow queries, blocking, deadlocks, and resource contention.
Optimize performance through advanced T-SQL tuning, indexing strategies, and execution plan analysis.
Build and maintain monitoring and alerting systems for database health and performance.
Participate in on-call rotations, triaging and resolving incidents to minimize downtime and business impact.
Own backup/restore processes, disaster recovery planning, and HA solutions (Always On, replication).
Ensure systems are resilient and meet uptime expectations.
Develop and maintain automation using PowerShell and SQL Server tooling (SQL Agent jobs, scripting, etc.) to streamline operations and reduce manual intervention.
Manage database access, permissions, and security configurations.
Ensure adherence to data protection and operational security best practices.
Work closely with application engineers to support production database usage, improve query efficiency, and troubleshoot issues in real time.