Senior Database Administrator - Core Infrastructure

As a Senior Database Administrator on Kraken's Core Infrastructure team, you join a senior group of DBAs and SREs responsible for the database platform underpinning many of the company's most critical services. You'll work in a collaborative, high-ownership environment focused on scaling distributed MariaDB environments, shaping reliable patterns for high-traffic systems, and transforming operational knowledge into automated, auditable workflows that uplift the entire engineering organization.

What you'll do

• Scale and tune high-throughput MariaDB clusters to support continued global expansion and new product initiatives
• Strengthen high-availability, disaster-recovery, and backup approaches through sound design and regularly validated procedures
• Reduce manual operational work by building automation, improving process consistency, and enabling safe, low-friction database workflows
• Improve observability and alert quality by championing meaningful metrics, reducing noise, and ensuring operational clarity across environments
• Enhance database security through robust access controls, disciplined patching and upgrade practices, and secure operational patterns
• Contribute to modern platform initiatives, including containerized environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, and reproducible deployments
• Partner with service teams to drive better performance patterns, operational readiness, and database hygiene across the engineering organization
• Participate in on-call rotations with a long-term focus on making on-call predictable, informed by high-quality signal and preventative engineering

What you bring

• 5+ years operating MariaDB/MySQL in high-volume production environments, including tuning, replication, and troubleshooting
• Strong understanding of high-availability patterns, distributed database behavior, and practical failure scenarios
• Hands-on experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers such as HAProxy, ProxySQL, or MaxScale
• Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows (Terraform experience ideal)
• Solid cloud, Linux, and networking fundamentals
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms, building container images and managing Kubernetes workloads at scale
• Strong security instincts around access control, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows
• Observability expertise: monitoring, alerting hygiene, and readiness for incident response
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to partner with stakeholders, negotiate long-term plans, write formal documentation, and tie success to specific metrics and KPIs

Nice to have

• Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, or reliability programs
• Strong scripting or programming ability (Python or Rust preferred) used to build automation and internal tools
• Hands-on experience with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI
• Exposure to multi-region or disaster-recovery designs
• Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems

About Kraken

Kraken is part of Payward, a financial infrastructure company that has spent 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial platforms in the industry. Payward operates Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks, advancing an open, global financial system.