{"id":2185580,"url":"https://alion.io/job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2","title":"Senior Database Engineer","company":{"id":12307,"name":"Capital on Tap","domain":"capitalontap.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/capital-on-tap","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":90,"open_postings":32,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.375,"repost_share":0.031,"time_to_fill_p50_days":47,"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["London, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":79000,"max_usd":153000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":35},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":".NET","optional":false},{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Azure SQL Database","optional":false},{"name":"Entity Framework Core","optional":false},{"name":"MS SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"PowerShell","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-04T20:03:41Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-09","last_verified_at":"2026-10-12T12:28:11Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":7,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":7},"description":"We’re Capital on Tap\n Capital on Tap started because small businesses were underserved. Big banks were slow, their products weren't fit for purpose, and small business owners often couldn't access what they needed. We set out to fix that.\nToday we're a financial platform - not just a credit card company. We offer a best-in-class business credit card, SME-focused spend management platform, a savings product that hit £1 billion in funds within its first year, and a growing suite of tools and financial products that make running a small business easier. \n1,000+ employees, £20bn in annual card spend, 200,000+ customers, 17,000+ Trustpilot reviews averaging 4.7 stars, and we're profitable. We’ve done a pretty good job so far, but we’re just getting started! \nLondon, Old Street | 2 Days in Office\nDatabase Engineering at Capital on Tap\nOur platform runs on .NET and SQL Server on Azure, and it has grown a long way past what it was originally designed for. We are hiring our first dedicated database performance engineer to own performance and scale: to make the fast paths fast, to keep them fast as volume grows, and to give every engineer here the tooling and the judgement to write data access that holds up in production. You will join a small agile team comprising DBAs and site reliability engineers in a hands-on senior individual contributor role. You will not be a ticket queue. You will pick the work that moves latency, cost and reliability, and you will be trusted to say what needs re-architecting.\nWhat You'll Do\nOwn query and index performance across our transactional SQL Server estate, using execution plans, Query Store, wait statistics, real production telemetry or other data driven measures.\nInvestigate and implement horizontal scaling techniques such as multi-cluster architecture, contained availability groups, sharding, etc, to ensure Capital on Tap’s distributed software estate can continue to support a fast growing customer base and increasing service count.\nFind and remove the bottlenecks on our latency critical paths, starting with card authorisation and ledger read/writes, and hold them to an agreed p99 budget.\nOwn high availability and disaster recovery. Availability groups, failover, backup and restore testing against real RTO and RPO targets, and the runbooks that go with them.\nBuild and enhance self serve tooling to enable development teams to identify query plan regressions along with self service diagnostic tools to allow teams to debug their own query performance.\nAutomate what is currently manual, using PowerShell, Python, or Terraform, and treat database configuration as code.\nManage SQL Server cost as a first-class metric alongside latency and uptime.\nWork alongside Product Engineering and our data analytics team, reviewing designs before they ship and levelling up how the whole engineering org thinks about data access.\nOur Values & Culture\nJust Pilot: We never settle for “good enough”. We pilot new ideas fast, ask questions to figure it out, and scale quickly.\nWhy Not Today? Fast is as slow as we go - speed and simplicity gives us a competitive advantage.\nBe a Buddy: We tap in from day one to help the team, we do the right thing even if it’s hard.\nOwners and Dates: We don’t chase people. If you own a task and agree to a date, the expectation is that it gets done.\nFeedback: We want our employees to flourish, so we regularly provide direct and constructive feedback.\nWhat We're Looking For\nSubstantial experience running Microsoft SQL Server in production at scale, whether that be self managed, Managed Instances, or on Azure SQL, in a business where downtime and latency have direct commercial impact.\nReal depth in the internals. The query optimiser and plan cache, indexing and statistics, locking, blocking and isolation levels, tempdb, and the wait types that tell you which of those is actually hurting you.\nA track record of specific, measurable performance wins you can walk us through end to end.\nExperience scaling relational data past the point where tuning alone works. Partitioning, archival, denormalisation, caching, read replicas, or a considered move to a different store.\nComfortable writing application code, not just scripts. T-SQL to an expert level, plus PowerShell or Python, and infrastructure as code.\nHands-on with HA/DR design and with leading production incidents.\nExperience working with ORMs (ideally Entity Framework) and the particular performance tradeoffs that come with an ORM.\nWorking knowledge of other database engines such as PostgreSQL, and views on the relative pros/cons.\nAn ability to translate technical concepts and tradeoffs to non-database specialists.\nInterview Process\n\n30 minute screening with a talent partner\n45 minute tech chat with Hiring Manager\n90 minute technical interview \n30 minute values interview with Head of Platform Engineering\nDiversity & Inclusion\n We welcome, consider and encourage applications from anyone who shares our commitment to inclusivity. Join us in creating a space where authenticity thrives, and everyone can do their best work.\nGreat Work Deserves Great Perks \n We try not to take ourselves too seriously (all the time) so we make sure our office is decked out with a pool table, arcade machine, beer tap, and a couple of office dogs thrown in for good measure. Check out our benefits:\nPrivate Healthcare including dental and opticians services through Vitality\nWorldwide travel insurance through Vitality\nAnniversary Rewards (£250, £500, £750, 4-week fully paid sabbatical)\nSalary Sacrifice Pension Scheme up to 7% match\n28 days holiday (plus bank holidays)\nAnnual Learning and Wellbeing Budget\nEnhanced Parental Leave\nCycle to Work Scheme\nSeason Ticket Loan\n6 free therapy sessions per year\nDog Friendly Offices\nFree drinks and snacks in our offices\nCheck out more of our benefits, values and missionhere.\n\nOther Info\n Check out our ‘Top Tips’ for interviewing.\nKeep updated on new job opportunities by following us on Linkedin.\nEmail  if you have any questions.\nExcited to work here? Apply!\n If you’d like to progress your career within our fast growing, profitable fintech then click apply and we will aim to get back to you within 3 working days (during busy periods this could take up to 5 working days.)","description_format":"text","description_chars":6294,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Parental leave","Pet friendly"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cards & Card Issuing","Business & SME Lending","Procurement & Spend Management"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-09T16:14:34Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":7,"expected_fill_days":47,"reasons":["conf:1","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-12T06:55:09Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-12T17:18:54Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":27793,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-13T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":12307},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=12307"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fcapital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fcapital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fcapital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fcapital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer-2"}]}