SQL Site Reliability Engineer

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) – SQL is a critical technical leader responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, and reliability of Tyler Technologies’ SQL Server infrastructure. This role combines deep database expertise with operational excellence to support high-performance systems across complex client environments. The ideal candidate is confident, authoritative, and takes ownership in diagnosing and resolving issues, while influencing database design, infrastructure improvements, and long-term stability strategies.

Hybrid Work Policy: The candidate is required to be on-site at least 3x per week at the Plano, TX office.

Responsibilities

Serve as the lead resource for high-severity SQL Server incidents, driving triage, diagnostics, and resolution in real time.

Own performance tuning, indexing strategies, and architecture-level improvements to optimize database systems at scale.

Proactively monitor database performance, system health, and workload trends to identify and resolve issues before they impact customers.

Collaborate with product and development teams to refine schema design, improve query performance, and enhance overall data architecture.

Develop and maintain database standards, observability dashboards, and automation for patching, backups, and alerting.

Design and execute comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategies for critical systems.

Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives, including cloud modernization, infrastructure as code, and capacity planning.

Author technical documentation, including runbooks, architecture designs, internal KBs, and lessons learned.

Provide mentorship and technical leadership to engineers across support and infrastructure teams.

Advocate for architectural and operational improvements across teams, using data and insight to influence decisions.

Role Complexity

To be successful, this individual must:

Demonstrate expert-level understanding of SQL Server internals, optimization techniques, and operational best practices.

Lead high-stakes conversations and incident calls with clarity, confidence, and control.

Understand system-level performance (I/O, memory, CPU) and how it affects SQL operations.

Communicate technical issues and solutions to both technical and business stakeholders effectively.

Analyze recurring incidents to identify trends and permanently resolve root causes.

Operate autonomously with a sense of ownership and urgency.

Balance short-term firefighting with long-term architectural planning and automation.

Qualifications

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field—or 5+ years of equivalent experience.

Proven experience in a production-facing SQL Server environment, preferably in a SaaS or multi-tenant context.

Hands-on expertise in:

Query tuning, indexing, and execution plan analysis.

High availability, replication, disaster recovery, and backup strategies.

Scripting and automation using PowerShell, T-SQL, or similar.

Monitoring and observability tools for SQL Server and infrastructure health.

Strong familiarity with virtualization, storage performance, and cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure).

Demonstrated ability to lead incident response and influence cross-functional technical decisions.

Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, especially under pressure.

Previous experience mentoring peers or junior engineers is a plus.