About the role
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. Strong medior profiles are welcome — years of experience matter less than the depth and relevance of your SQL Server skillset.
