Principal Database Engineer

Kraken

2d•$161,000 - $358,900

About The Position

Payward is hiring a Principal Database Engineer for Kraken’s Core Infrastructure Engineering team, which builds and operates the shared data systems supporting critical production services. The estate spans 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 and work spanning several quarters. The engineer will assess the database estate against business needs and production evidence, set its target architecture and measurable goals, and agree a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams. They will remain hands-on in delivering that roadmap, including difficult migrations and scaling decisions, and verify results in production. The role also includes investigating MariaDB failures and performance limits; improving reliability, observability, backup, restore and disaster recovery; developing safe and auditable database provisioning and maintenance software; and partnering with application teams on schemas, transactions, queries and data-store choices. The engineer will mentor colleagues, participate in on-call and incident response, and help establish clear operational ownership.

Requirements

At least 8 years operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
Experience assessing inherited systems, setting technical direction and delivering improvements with engineering teams, with the ability to explain how decisions held up over time.
Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes.
Ability to explain consistency and availability trade-offs and reason about transaction boundaries and reliable event delivery, including transactional outbox patterns.
Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC and transaction isolation, locking, query optimisation, binary logs and MariaDB GTID replication.
Ability to explain the mechanisms and diagnostic evidence behind technical decisions.
Personal ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning and tested restore or point-in-time recovery, including establishing data integrity and explaining remaining uncertainties.
Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or a comparable language.
Experience personally building and maintaining production software or automation for database workflows such as provisioning, failover, online schema changes and self-service operations.
Experience using version control, code review and delivery pipelines, with tested failure handling.
Strong low-level Linux, kernel, storage and networking fundamentals, including the ability to investigate problems beyond the database process.
Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated delivery across teams without reporting-line authority.
Ability to help stakeholders make sound database design and lifecycle decisions and develop experienced engineers through shared delivery.

Nice To Haves

Experience operating databases in containerised, hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-region environments.
Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code or GitOps, including their operational trade-offs.
Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers such as 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.

Responsibilities

Assess the database estate against business needs and production evidence, identifying reliability, scale, cost and operational-complexity issues, as well as what should be preserved or changed.
Define target architecture and measurable goals, and agree a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams.
Explain trade-offs, sequence work around delivery risks, and adapt plans as evidence changes.
Deliver the roadmap through design, implementation and adoption, personally contributing to difficult migrations and scaling decisions.
Use representative benchmarks, data-integrity checks, and credible cutover and rollback plans; verify results in production.
Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits across engine, storage and application behaviour.
Improve fleet reliability through observability, safer changes, and tested backup, restore and disaster recovery procedures.
Set recovery objectives with service owners and validate them through exercises.
Build and maintain production software for database provisioning, upgrades and routine maintenance.
Make self-service workflows safe and auditable, incorporating access controls and change evidence with Security and Compliance.
Work with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries and data-store choices; clarify operational consequences and resolve cross-team dependencies.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and incident analysis, helping them deepen database expertise and take ownership of technical decisions.
Participate in on-call and incident response, establish clear operational ownership and follow through on lessons from production.