Principal Database Engineer

The role

You will assess, set goals, and provide technical direction for the shared data systems estate. You will work hands-on to deliver improvements, manage MariaDB, and build production software for database workflows.

What you will do

• Review the estate against business needs and production evidence
• Define target architecture and measurable goals
• Execute the roadmap through design, implementation, and adoption
• Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits
• Improve fleet reliability through observability and tested recovery procedures
• Build and maintain production software for database provisioning and maintenance
• Work with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, and queries
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and incident analysis
• Participate in on-call and incident response

Required qualifications

• 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale
• Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes
• Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise including InnoDB, MVCC and transaction isolation, locking, query optimisation, binary logs and MariaDB GTID replication
• Personal ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning and tested restore or point-in-time recovery
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or a comparable language
• Strong low-level Linux, Kernel, storage and networking fundamentals
• Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated delivery across teams without reporting-line authority

Nice to have

• Experience operating databases in containerised, hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-region environments
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code or GitOps
• Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers (MaxScale, HAProxy, ProxySQL, or similar)
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse or internal database platforms
• Operational knowledge of Kafka, Redis/Valkey or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch
• Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database engines, operators and other infrastructure software

Before you apply

• We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments

About the company

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks. Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms.