Senior Engineering Manager Database

McKesson is an impact-driven, Fortune 10 company that touches virtually every aspect of healthcare. We are seeking a Senior Manager, Database Engineering to lead the reliability, performance, and scalability of our PostgreSQL and SQL Server platforms across on-premises and Azure environments, supporting mission-critical systems and driving an engineering culture centered on automation and operational excellence.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of up to 8 database engineers and DBAs, leveling up engineering practices and outcomes
• Set clear goals, performance expectations, and development plans
• Foster a collaborative, high‑performance culture aligned with organizational strategy
• Act as an escalation point for complex operational issues and high‑severity incidents
• Operate as a player‑coach: ~30–40% hands‑on in design, tuning, incident response, and migrations; ~60–70% leadership and strategy
• Ensure availability, performance, and reliability of database operations for mission‑critical workloads
• Oversee incident response, root‑cause analysis, and continuous improvement
• Maintain HA/DR strategies, RTO/RPO compliance, backups, and recovery processes
• Manage operational runbooks, SOPs, SLAs, and governance standards
• Provide architectural direction for SQL Server and PostgreSQL across on‑prem and Azure
• Lead upgrades, migrations, capacity planning, and modernization initiatives
• Drive performance monitoring, tuning, and proactive engineering
• Oversee database security, patching, auditing, and compliance
• Advance the adoption of Azure SQL, SQL Managed Instance, and Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server
• Partner with cloud and architecture teams to implement IaC, CI/CD, and automated deployments
• Promote SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and automation‑first operations
• Reduce manual work through automation and self‑healing processes
• Implement observability practices using metrics, logs, traces, and alerting
• Work with application, infrastructure, cloud, and security teams to ensure system reliability and performance
• Communicate risk, status, and insights to leadership
• Influence architectural decisions and guide solution onboarding

Requirements:

• Degree or equivalent experience
• Typically requires 9+ years of professional experience and 1+ years of supervisory and/or management experience
• 9+ years in database engineering/administration
• 2+ years of people management experience
• Deep (5-7 years) expertise in SQL Server and PostgreSQL in enterprise environments
• Experience supporting 24×7 mission-critical systems
• Hands-on experience with Azure SQL, SQL Managed Instance, and Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server
• Knowledge of HA/DR, performance tuning, monitoring, and capacity planning
• Familiarity with automation tools (Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, PowerShell, Python)
• Bachelor's degree preferred
• Experience managing large-scale database environments
• Background in SRE and observability platforms (Azure Monitor, Grafana, Prometheus, App Insights)
• Experience leading cloud modernization or major database migrations
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
• Experience in regulated environments (SOX, HIPAA, PCI)