About the role
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A well-established Belgian financial services organisation based in Leuven is looking for an experienced SQL Server DBA to join their infrastructure team on a freelance basis. The position has opened due to an internal team change and represents a genuine operational need — not a pipeline exercise.
You'll be joining a mature, collaborative IT infrastructure team of around 15-20 people, working alongside highly experienced database professionals. The environment is primarily on-premises Microsoft SQL Server, with a roadmap toward Azure SQL in the coming years.
Contract details
Location: Leuven (hybrid — 2 days on-site per week)
Start: ASAP
Duration: End of year, with strong likelihood of extension
Rate: market rate
Languages: Dutch + English required
What you'll be doing
Own the full SQL Server infrastructure — installation, configuration, management, security and lifecycle
Monitor the environment daily, proactively detecting and resolving issues before they impact business continuity
Analyse complex incidents and lead Root Cause Analysis
Design and implement structural improvements to performance, stability and security
Manage upgrades, migrations and decommissions across SQL systems
Serve as the technical escalation point for colleagues on database incidents
Maintain and improve the team's knowledge base — runbooks, documentation and training materials
Must haves
Hands-on SQL Server DBA experience (2019/2022/2025)
T-SQL: queries, stored procedures, DDL
Performance tuning at infrastructure level
Always On Availability Groups in production
SQL Server Replication
Windows Server environment knowledge
ITIL process awareness: incident, problem, change management
Dutch working language (daily team communication)
Nice to haves
PostgreSQL or MySQL experience
Azure SQL / Azure cloud exposure
SSIS / SSRS
PowerShell scripting or TerraForm
Monitoring tools: Grafana, Sentryone, Dynatrace
Agile/SAFe experience (Jira, sprints)
The team
You'll be working in a multi-cluster infrastructure team with deep collective expertise. The team has a fixed collaboration day on Wednesday. xphnsxz Strong medior profiles are welcome — years of experience matter less than the depth and relevance of your SQL Server skillset.