Principal Database Engineer

As a Principal Database Engineer at Kraken, you bring long-term experience and technical judgment to assess, set direction for, and improve the Core Infrastructure Engineering team's data systems estate. You work hands-on with the team across on-premises and cloud infrastructure, with MariaDB at its centre and Kafka, Redis and Elasticsearch across the wider platform. This is an individual contributor role with influence across teams, delivering measurable improvements over several quarters.

What you'll do

• Review the database estate against business needs and production evidence, assessing reliability, scale, cost and operational complexity to identify what should be preserved and where investment or simplification would make a difference.
• Define the target architecture and measurable goals, agreeing a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams, explaining trade-offs and sequencing work around delivery risks.
• Execute the roadmap with the team through design, implementation and adoption, staying personally involved in difficult migrations and scaling decisions with representative benchmarks, data-integrity checks and credible cutover and rollback plans.
• Investigate difficult MariaDB failures and performance limits through the engine, storage and application behaviour, improving 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, making self-service workflows safe and auditable with access controls and change evidence incorporated with Security and Compliance.
• Work with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries and data-store choices, making the operational consequences clear and resolving dependencies that span teams.
• Mentor engineers across the team through design reviews, pairing and incident analysis, helping them deepen their database expertise and take ownership of technical decisions.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, leaving clear operational ownership and following through on lessons from production.

What you bring

• 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale, with a track record of assessing inherited systems, setting technical direction and delivering improvements with engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes, including consistency and availability trade-offs, transaction boundaries, reliable event delivery and transactional outbox patterns.
• 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 procedures.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or a comparable language, with a track record of building and maintaining production software or automation for database workflows such as provisioning, failover, online schema changes and self-service operations using version control, code review and delivery pipelines.
• Strong low-level Linux, kernel, storage and networking fundamentals, with the ability to investigate problems beyond the database process.
• Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated delivery across teams without reporting-line authority, helping stakeholders make sound database design and lifecycle decisions.

Nice to have

• Experience operating databases in containerised, hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-region environments, with 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, or operational knowledge of Kafka, Redis/Valkey or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database engines, operators and other infrastructure software.

About Kraken

Kraken, founded in 2011, is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking and OTC services for both individual investors and institutional clients. Kraken is part of Payward, which operates a suite of modern financial infrastructure platforms including NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks.