Technical Data Specialist

Global Speciality Insurance (GSI) is a grouping of insurance entities across the UK and North America that is part of the larger Munich RE organization. We are seeking to recruit a data specialist primarily to support within the Bell and Clements (B&C) entity. Bell & Clements offers expertise in underwriting, broking, and capacity management provisions for Excess and Surplus (E&S) lines insurance solutions. This role is part of the GSI Business Solutions, Data & Analytics organization reporting into the Head of Data Solutions Architecture.

Purpose of the Position

The qualified candidate will be primarily responsible for supporting the mission-critical databases that enable B&C to conduct its processing. You will closely partner with the Software Engineering, Data Analyst, and Architecture teams together with local Senior Technology leadership.

We are looking for a Data Specialist with a multi-faceted skillset that has proven experience with migrating data systems into the cloud. An Azure-based background is essential for this aspect of the role. In addition, your knowledge of Microsoft-based systems, database administration, data architecture, support operations, and infrastructure responsibilities will be critical to support the B&C environments as well as other opportunities across the many businesses within GSI.

Duties and Responsibilities will include:

• Primary responsibility for operational uptime of databases used by the Bell & Clements Group.
• Support data solution architects in designing architecture solutions that are in line with long-term business objectives.
• Developing data management projects that move a company closer to its future goals.
• Support the design of data infrastructure that supports complex data analytics services.
• Providing technical leadership and direction on data infrastructure architecture for the Software Engineering and Data Analytics teams.
• Collaborate with the Software Engineering and Data Analytics teams to analyse, identify, design, and implement processes and continuously support/improve them.
• Building effective relationships with senior technical staff to ensure a common understanding of goals and challenges.
• Meeting with clients, peers, data solution architects, or executive team members to engage in architectural and requirement analysis discussions.
• Creating documentation that captures key data entities and creating an inventory of the data needed to implement solutions.
• Translating business requirements into databases, data warehouses, and data streams.
• Analysing, planning, and defining data architecture framework, including security, reference data, metadata, and master data.
• Helping to maintain the integrity and security of the company’s database.
• Partner with technical peers to provide technical thought leadership on high-level architecture and design, data modelling, data strategy & adoption for ingestion and analytics applications within the insurance domain.
• Define technical principles, vision, and standards in partnership with your peers.
• Ensure the design can scale to handle additional data demands.
• Ensure key performance indicators of applications are baselined with respect to data loads and continuously monitored.
• Devise performance improvement plans working with the Software Engineering, Data Analytics, and Infrastructure teams.
• Audit support and enforce GDPR compliance as needed.
• Work independently to configure and maintain the database servers and processes.
• Monitor system health and ensure high levels of performance are maintained optimally 24/7 securely.
• Manage and deliver migrations to the cloud environment using Microsoft Azure to agreed timescales.
• Leading the DataOps function to ensure there are robust deployment pipelines and gates in place before any database codebase is released into production.
• Manage the manual deployments of database changes into UAT and Production until an automated solution is deployed.
• Participate in software engineering, data analytics, architectural, development operations, and systems support projects as needed.
• Work with the Software Engineering and Data Analyst teams to provide database architecture guidance to ensure new solutions are designed correctly from the ground up and any legacy designs are re-engineered for optimal performance.
• Patch the database environments on the 3rd Sunday of every month, managing this remotely.
• 3+ years’ proven cloud migration experience using Microsoft Azure including DBA activities on Cloud.
• Experience with Azure-based cloud migration, specifically in the data space.
• Experience with Databricks, lakehouse concepts, and the ability to support this environment is desired.
• Experience in managing structured and unstructured databases.
• Experience with backups, restores, and recovery models.
• Develop processes for optimizing database security - Cyber Security regulation knowledge is important for this position.
• Knowledge of High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) options for SQL Server.
• Expert management of high availability clusters.
• Familiarity with data warehousing structures and technology.
• Experience with Performance Tuning and Optimization (PTO), using native monitoring and third-party troubleshooting tools.
• Experience in working as a gatekeeper by performing database code reviews and instilling good coding standards and practices.
• Experience of building and maintaining database deployment pipelines using DevOps and tools such as Redgate, as well as managing manual database deployments across environments, where required.
• Ability to facilitate an Agile development environment and cope with the dynamics of a small team.
• Ability to organize and plan work independently.
• Insurance sector experience.
• Experience working with Windows server, including Active Directory.
• Microsoft Certified.

Munich RE is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications regardless of sex, marital status, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious belief, or age.