{"id":1421277,"url":"https://alion.io/job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer","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":34,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.412,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":54,"computed_at":"2026-09-29T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"hybrid","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":75000,"max_usd":140000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":20},"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":"C#","optional":false},{"name":"Entity Framework Core","optional":false},{"name":"MS SQL","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"PowerShell","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-28T19:09:34Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-28","last_verified_at":"2026-09-29T23:46:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"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! \nThis is a Hybrid role, the AI team work from our Moorgate (London) Offices 2 days per week.\nThe Role\nOur platform runs on .NET and SQL Server on Azure, and it has grown well beyond what it was originally designed for. We're hiring our first dedicated Database Performance Engineer to own performance and scale: to make the fast paths fast, keep them fast as volume grows, and give every engineer here the tooling and judgement to write data access that holds up in production.\nYou'll join a small, agile team of DBAs and site reliability engineers in a hands-on, senior individual contributor role. You won't be working a ticket queue. You'll choose the work that moves the needle on latency, cost and reliability, and you'll be trusted to call out 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.\nEvangelise advanced database technologies to the software engineering teams. Research, demo and promote technologies such as graph databases and zero-downtime data migrations, and how they can be used in EF via C#.\nWhat We're Looking For\nExperience working with ORMs (ideally Entity Framework) and the particular performance tradeoffs that come with an ORM.\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.\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.\nDiversity & Inclusion \nWe 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\nWe 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\nOctopus EV Salary Sacrifice Scheme\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.\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":5815,"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":[{"name":"United Kingdom","iso":"GB","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cards & Card Issuing","Business & SME Lending","Procurement & Spend Management"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-28T22:29:50Z"}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":54,"reasons":["conf:3","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-09-29T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/capital-on-tap-senior-database-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-30T02:46:28Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":1982,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":3018,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-01T00:00:00Z"}}}