About the role
The Principal Database Engineer plays a key role in mentoring, setting standards, designing, implementing, and maintaining robust database systems that support T-Mobile's large-scale applications and analytics. This position drives the modernisation of database platforms, adoption of cloud-native data technologies, and continuous improvement of performance, reliability, and automation across mission-critical systems. You will collaborate with software engineers, cloud architects, and DevOps teams to deliver secure, scalable, and high-performance database solutions that align with business and technical objectives. The role combines strong database engineering expertise with strategic thinking and hands-on technical execution.
Responsibilities:
- Design and implement enterprise-grade database architectures for transactional and analytical workloads.
- Automate database provisioning, schema management, patching, config management and upgrades through CI/CD pipelines for both on-prem and cloud-native databases.
- Drive adoption of cloud database platforms (e. g., AWS: RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, Elastic Cache, Redis Cache and Azure: SQL Database, Managed instances, Redis Cache).
- Implement observability, monitoring, and alerting for database performance and reliability.
- Ensure compliance with data governance, security, and backup/recovery standards.
- Partner with application, infrastructure, and DevOps teams to deliver integrated data solutions.
- Mentor senior and junior engineers and contribute to technical design reviews.
- Lead troubleshooting and root cause analysis of complex database issues.
Requirements:
- Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
- 9+ years of experience in database engineering, development, or administration.
- Expertise in relational and/or NoSQL systems such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, or Cassandra.
- Strong understanding of data modelling, indexing, replication, sharding, and partitioning.
- Hands-on experience with cloud database services (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Proficiency in scripting (Python, Bash), Ansible and Terraform for automation and integration.
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).
- Proven ability to tune queries and design performant, scalable data architectures.
- Excellent analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills.
- Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible).
- Exposure to observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk and OpenTelemetry.