Database Site Reliability Engineer - SQL

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world.

Lilly’s Purpose: 

At Lilly, we unite caring with discovery to make life better for people around the world. We are a global healthcare leader headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Our employees around the world waork to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to our communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. We give our best effort to our work, and we put people first. We’re looking for people who are determined to make life better for people around the world. 

Come help us unlock the power of SQL Operations through AI & Automation!

The Enterprise Data organization is actively looking for an SQL Database Site Reliability Engineer to join our team. For solving complex challenges and driving large-scale impact here is the opportunity to shape the future of SQL database operations across on-prem SQL and Cloud SQL PaaS, and multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) through automation and AI-driven solutions.

Job Summary: 

SQL Database Site Reliability Engineer will be supporting mission-critical SQL server environments across on-prem, Cloud SQL PaaS.

Also responsible for driving automation of day-to-day DBA tasks, enabling multi-cloud database operations and migrations, and ensuring cost-effective and secure environments.

The role provides opportunities to work with Oracle PaaS/IaaS services, qualify and adopt new database technologies, and implement CI/CD pipelines to automate deployments.

As part of this role, you will Collaborate with SMEs, Cloud Infrastructure, and Self-Service Enabling teams to bring enhancements and automation to database operations.

Improve service qualification and database lifecycle management through automation at an enterprise scale.

Ensure compliance with Lilly security standards by performing vulnerability scanning, timely patching, and upgrades. Work on AI-driven insights to improve observability, reliability, and proactive incident prevention.

Roles & Responsibilities

Operational Support: Provide day-to-day administration, monitoring, and support for SQL Server all the editions (2014, 2016 and above). Manage database performance tuning, backup/recovery, patching, and upgrades. Ensure database availability, resiliency, and security compliance. Handle Database INC, Requests and Changes. Provide 24x7 production support with on-call rotation during weekends.

Database Administration: Install, configure, upgrade, and patch Microsoft SQL Server (SQL 2014 and above all editions). Monitor database performance, tuning queries, indexes, and optimizing execution plans. Troubleshoot database issues, errors, and performance bottlenecks. Work closely with application teams to support new server and database creations, maintenance job creation, CDC configuration.

Multi-cloud Database Modernization: Support and administrate SQL server migrations to various Cloud platforms. Ensure to support both Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Database migration. Assist with database replication, DR solutions, and cross-cloud failover planning.

Automation of Operational Tasks: Develop and maintain scripts, pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) (Bicep, ARM, Terraform, Ansible, Shell, Python) to automate routine database tasks. Implement AIOps practices for proactive issue detection, anomaly detection, and predictive alerting.

Collaboration & Continuous Improvement: Work closely with operations, application, and cloud engineering teams to deliver reliable database services. Drive innovation through automation, monitoring, and AI-driven solutions to reduce manual efforts. Document best practices, runbooks, and operational procedures.

Capacity Planning & Scalability: Forecast database growth, manage resource utilization, and ensure scalability to handle increasing workloads while maintaining performance.

Database Security & Compliance: Ensure compliance with enterprise security policies (e.g., encryption, access control, auditing, vulnerability scans). Maintain adherence to Lilly security standards as required. Ensure providing less permissions to customers accounts and manage it.

Backup & Recovery Management: Design, automate, and test robust backup and restore processes (full, differential, transaction log backups) by storing the backup copies in PPDM (DELL Storage solution). Regularly validate recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). Ensure high availability of PPDM storages and backups.

Cost Optimization & Resource Efficiency: Optimize SQL resource allocation in both on-premises and cloud (Azure SQL DB, Managed Instance, IaaS VMs). Ensure cost efficiency by monitoring and right-sizing workloads.

SLA & SRE Principles Enforcement: Define and enforce SLIs (Service Level Indicators), SLOs (Service Level Objectives), and SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for SQL services, aligning with SRE principles.

Disaster Recovery (DR) Drills & Testing: Work with DR team to perform regular DR drills to validate business continuity, ensuring systems can failover and recover as expected.

Documentation & Knowledge Sharing: Maintain detailed documentation of database configurations, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting guides. Share knowledge across teams to reduce operational silos.

Soft Skills

• Strong problem-solving, troubleshooting, and analytical mindset with a focus on reliability and continuous improvement.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities to work effectively with cross-functional and global teams.
• Adaptability to dynamic environments and ability to manage multiple priorities in fast-paced operations.
• Commitment to accountability, ownership, and driving results through innovation and automation.
• Willingness to participate in 24×7 operational support with an on-call rotation.
  
  
  

Your Qualification

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, MCA, or a related technical field.
• 3-12+ years of experience as an SQL Platform Engineer in an enterprise environment with relevant experience in SQL database administration plus supporting mission-critical production environments.
  
  
  

Additional Skills/requirements

• SQL Server Administration: Strong expertise in SQL Server (on-premises, Azure SQL Database, and Managed Instance) administration.
• Incident & On-Call Management: Experience in on-call rotations, handling high-severity incidents, and performing RCA (Root Cause Analysis).
• Backup & Recovery: Proficiency in native SQL Server backups, restore strategies, and validating RPO/RTO objectives.
• Database Internals & Query Optimization: Deep understanding of query execution plans, indexing, partitioning, statistics, and troubleshooting T-Log file growth issues.
• Performance Tuning: Hands-on expertise in query optimization, indexing strategies, and performance troubleshooting.
• Monitoring & Observability: Experience with Splunk or equivalent monitoring/logging tools for proactive issue detection.
• Incident/Change Management Tools: Hands-on with ServiceNow or equivalent ITSM tools.
• Documentation & Compliance: Expertise in documentation to maintain Security/CSQA standards and ensure audit readiness.
• High Availability & Disaster Recovery (HA/DR): Strong knowledge of Always On Availability Groups, Failover Cluster Instances, Log Shipping, Replication, and Geo-Replication.
• Disaster Recovery Planning: Designing and executing DR plans, conducting DR drills, and validating business continuity.
• Database DevOps (DBOps): Strong understanding of DevOps practices, Git-based workflows, schema versioning, and collaboration with developers for schema changes/migrations.
• Change Data Capture (CDC): Experience configuring and managing CDC for data replication and auditing.
• Security & Compliance: Deep knowledge of RBAC, least privilege, encryption (TDE, Always Encrypted), auditing, vulnerability assessments, and penetration testing.
• Cloud Platforms: Solid understanding of Azure SQL Database, Azure Managed Instance, SQL on Azure VMs; AWS experience is an additional advantage.
• Containers & Orchestration: Exposure to Kubernetes and Docker for database containerization.
• Automation & Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Experience with Ansible, Terraform, and Bicep/ARM templates for database provisioning, patching, and configuration.
• Scripting & Programming: Strong skills in PowerShell, Python, and T-SQL (PL/SQL experience is a plus for cross-platform).
• Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis: Skilled at analyzing logs (SQL error logs, Windows event logs, monitoring tool logs) to identify and resolve underlying issues.
• Cloud Cost Optimization: Knowledge of scaling strategies, hybrid architectures, and cost management in cloud environments.
  
  
  

Desirable Skills

• Exposure to AI/ML-driven monitoring or AIOps tools for predictive insights and automated remediation.
• Familiarity with multi-cloud environments (Oracle Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP) for database deployment and operations.
• Experience in project management methodologies (like Agile or Scrum) will be added advantage.
  
  
  

Lilly is dedicated to helping individuals with disabilities to actively engage in the workforce, ensuring equal opportunities when vying for positions. If you require accommodation to submit a resume for a position at Lilly, please complete the accommodation request form (https://careers.lilly.com/us/en/workplace-accommodation) for further assistance. Please note this is for individuals to request an accommodation as part of the application process and any other correspondence will not receive a response.

Lilly does not discriminate on the basis of age, race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, protected veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

#WeAreLilly

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