Principal Database Engineer

United States, Remote. Posted 2 days ago

The role

You will review Kraken's database estate, set goals and a prioritised roadmap, and carry out the work hands-on with the team. You will mainly work on MariaDB, the core of the shared data systems behind production services. This is an individual contributor role with influence across teams.

What you will do

Review the database estate against business needs and production evidence.
Define the target architecture, measurable goals and a prioritised roadmap.
Execute the roadmap through design, implementation and adoption, including difficult migrations.
Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits.
Improve reliability through observability, safer changes and tested backup and recovery procedures.
Build and maintain production software for database provisioning, upgrades and maintenance.
Work with application teams on schemas, transactions, queries and data-store choices.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and incident analysis.
Take part 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, locking, query optimisation, binary logs and 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 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 such as MaxScale, HAProxy or ProxySQL.
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 or infrastructure software.

Before you apply

Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.
Candidates may be asked to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments; results are not the sole basis for any decision.
Applicants with criminal histories are considered in line with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

About the company

Kraken is part of Payward, a financial infrastructure company founded in 2011. Kraken offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking and OTC services to over 10 million individuals and institutions.