Principal Database Engineer

Title: Principal Database Engineer
Location: Mumbai, India
The Role:
At Morningstar, our mission to empower investors is driven by trusted, high-quality data. We are seeking a Principal Database Engineer to join the International Wealth Platform team, where you will play a leadership role in shaping and delivering scalable, reliable, and performant database platforms that support operational systems, analytics, and reporting.
As a Principal Database Engineer, you will work closely with the Architecture team and Data Product Owner to contribute to the platform's database and data strategy, providing technical recommendations across relational and NoSQL data stores. You will guide a diverse team comprising DBAs, SQL Engineers, and Data Engineers, ensuring database solutions are robust, secure, and aligned with business needs.
This role offers the opportunity to work with complex existing SQL data models, document databases such as RavenDB (with evaluation of Azure Cosmos DB), and cloud platforms on Azure (preferred) or AWS, within an Agile environment.
Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and provide technical direction across the database and data engineering function, reporting to the Technology Manager.
• Work with the Architecture team to shape and recommend database architecture patterns and standards.
• Partner with the Data Product Owner to translate business and reporting needs into scalable database solutions.
• Develop a strong understanding of existing SQL data models, schemas, and data flows, and guide their evolution.
• Own evaluation and recommendations for relational vs NoSQL usage, including RavenDB and Azure Cosmos DB.
• Work closely with DBAs and SQL Engineers to design, review, and optimize SQL schemas, queries, indexing, and performance.
• Support and guide data pipeline design where databases are core to ingestion, transformation, and reconciliation.
• Ensure database platforms effectively support analytics and reporting using Power BI.
• Support estimation and the end-to-end lifecycle from design through build, test, and production support.
• Promote DevOps / DataOps practices, including CI/CD, monitoring, backups, and operational readiness.
• Analyze and resolve production database issues with appropriate monitoring, alerting, and documentation.
• Own and prioritize the database technical backlog, addressing technical debt and improvements.
• Ensure relevant design, architecture, and run documentation is created and maintained.
• Mentor and guide DBAs, SQL Engineers, and Data Engineers, fostering a culture of quality and technical excellence.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to deliver reliable and scalable database solutions.

Requirements:
Must Have:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, with 9+ years of experience in database engineering, data platforms, or related roles.
• Strong hands-on experience with SQL, including understanding, designing, and optimizing complex existing data models and schemas.
• Deep experience with relational databases (SQL Server / Azure SQL or equivalent).
• Experience designing and operating database platforms on cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred; AWS acceptable).
• Solid understanding of database performance tuning, indexing strategies, partitioning, and capacity planning.
• Practical understanding of relational vs NoSQL trade-offs and real-world usage patterns.
• Experience collaborating with Architecture teams and Product Owners on technical recommendations.
• Experience with NoSQL / document databases such as RavenDB, Azure Cosmos DB, or MongoDB.
• Exposure to Python or data processing pipelines in support of database-centric solutions.
• Strong experience working in Agile environments using tools such as JIRA.

Good to Have:

• Experience supporting analytics and reporting using Power BI.
• Experience in regulated or financial services environments.
• Azure or AWS certifications (Database / Solutions Architect).

Join us in our mission to empower investors by ensuring the highest quality in our products. Be part of a dynamic team driving excellence in designing and develop innovative.
Morningstar is an equal opportunity employer.
If you receive and accept an offer from us, we require that personal and any related investments be disclosed confidentiality to our Compliance team (days vary by region). These investments will be reviewed to ensure they meet Code of Ethics requirements. If any conflicts of interest are identified, then you will be required to liquidate those holdings immediately. In addition, dependent on your department and location of work certain employee accounts must be held with an approved broker (for example all, U.S. employee accounts). If this applies and your account(s) are not with an approved broker, you will be required to move your holdings to an approved broker.
Morningstar's hybrid work environment gives you the opportunity to collaborate in-person each week as we've found that we're at our best when we're purposely together on a regular basis. In most of our locations, our hybrid work model is four days in-office each week. A range of other benefits are also available to enhance flexibility as needs change. No matter where you are, you'll have tools and resources to engage meaningfully with your global colleagues.
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