Principal Database Engineer

As Principal Database Engineer, you will guide the long-term direction of Kraken’s production MariaDB estate, partnering with engineering leads to improve reliability, scale, and cost. You’ll define target architecture,Roadmap, and oversee migrations and performance improvements, staying hands-on during challenging decisions. You’ll drive observable, safe changes and ensure credible recovery plans, while mentoring the team and shaping cross-team database design. This role offers impact across the core infrastructure that underpins global crypto services.

• Equity
• Bonus

• Assess the production MariaDB estate against business needs and production signals to identify improvements
• Define target architecture and a prioritized, risk-aware roadmap with engineering leads
• Execute the roadmap with the team, including migrations, benchmarks, and cutover/rollback plans
• Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits; improve reliability via observability, backups, DR procedures
• Build and maintain production software for provisioning, upgrades, and self-service database workflows with access controls
• Collaborate with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, and data-store choices; resolve cross-team dependencies
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, incident analysis, and hands-on guidance
• Participate in on-call and incident response with clear ownership and post-mortem learning

• 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale
• Strong understanding of HA, replication, and distributed failure modes
• Deep hands-on MariaDB expertise (InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, binary logs, GTID replication)
• Experience with incident diagnosis, performance tuning, and tested restore/point-in-time recovery
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or similar; production software for database workflows
• Strong Linux, kernel, storage and networking fundamentals
• Clear technical judgment and ability to drive delivery across teams without direct authority

• ownership mindset
• strong communication and technical judgment
• mentoring and collaboration
• MariaDB (InnoDB, MVCC, GTID, replication)
• Python, Go, Rust or equivalent
• Linux system foundations (kernel, storage, networking)