Principal Database Engineer

MySQL
UNITED STATES
November 12, 2026
Full Time
Apply Now

Job Description

Company: Kraken
Location: Remote
Workplace Type: Remote
Employment Type: Full-time
Pay / Compensation: $161K – $358.9K

About the Role

Kraken, the parent company behind Payward, is building a modern, globally accessible financial infrastructure platform. The Core Infrastructure Engineering team builds and operates shared data systems across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, centering on MariaDB, with Kafka, Redis, and Elasticsearch across the platform. We are hiring a Principal Database Engineer to assess, set the goals, and work hands-on to deliver measurable improvements to this estate.

What You’ll Do / Key Responsibilities

  • Review the estate against business needs, judging reliability, scale, cost, and operational complexity.
  • Define the target architecture and agree a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads.
  • Execute roadmaps through design, implementation, and adoption, staying involved in difficult migrations and scaling decisions.
  • Investigate difficult MariaDB failures and performance limits through the engine, storage, and application behaviour.
  • Improve fleet reliability through useful observability, safer changes, and tested backup, restore, and disaster recovery procedures.
  • Build and maintain production software for database provisioning, upgrades, and routine maintenance.
  • Participate in on-call and incident response, ensuring clear operational ownership.

Requirements & Qualifications

  • 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
  • Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, 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.
  • Personally built and maintained production software or automation for database workflows (provisioning, failover, online schema changes) using version control and delivery pipelines.
  • Strong low-level Linux, Kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals.

Preferred / Bonus Qualifications (if applicable)

  • 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).
  • Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, or operational knowledge of Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.

Benefits & Perks (if applicable)

  • Commitment to diversity and inclusion, hiring based on merit.
  • Opportunity to work on a globally accessible financial infrastructure platform.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind.

Related Jobs