Senior Software Engineer (Database Reliability)

About the role

We’re Capital on Tap 👋 💳 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.

Today 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.

1,000+ 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!

🏡🏢This is a Hybrid role, the Database team work from our Moorgate (London) Offices 2 days per week.

The Role

Our platform runs on .NET and SQL Server on Azure, and it has scaled well beyond its original design parameters. We're hiring our first dedicated Database Software Engineer to own performance and scale: to make the fast paths faster, keep them ahead as volume grows, and give every engineer here the tooling and judgement to write data access that holds up in production.

You'll join a small, agile team of Database Engineers and SREs 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.

What You'll Do

- Evangelise advanced database technologies to the software engineering teams. Research, demo and promote technologies such as graph databases, vector stores and zero-downtime data migrations, and how they can be used in C# via Entity Framework or other ORM technologies.

- Build 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.

- Work 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.

- Own performance across our transactional SQL Server estate, using execution plans, Query Store, wait statistics, real production telemetry and other data-driven measures.

- Investigate and implement 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.

What We're Looking For

- Experience working with ORMs (ideally Entity Framework) and the particular performance tradeoffs that come with an ORM.

- Substantial 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.