Principal Database Engineer

Kraken Digital Asset Exchange

. Review the database estate against business needs and production evidence, assessing reliability, scale, cost and operational complexity .

Posted 11/11/2026full-timeRemote • United StatesLead💰 $161,000 - $358,900 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates extensive expertise in MariaDB, including performance tuning, high availability, and disaster recovery, while effectively mentoring engineers and collaborating across teams to enhance database reliability and operational efficiency.

Highest-signal resume keywords

MariaDB ExpertiseProduction Database ManagementSoftware Engineering in Python, Go, RustHigh Availability and ReplicationIncident Response and Recovery

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

MariaDBPerformance TuningDatabase ProvisioningTransaction IsolationQuery OptimisationLinux FundamentalsAutomationDisaster Recovery ProceduresVersion ControlDatabase Incident Diagnosis

Soft Skills

Technical JudgmentMentoringCollaboration

Tools & Technologies

KubernetesGitOpsContainerisationKafkaRedisElasticsearchCloud EnvironmentsLoad BalancingInfrastructure as CodeDelivery Pipelines

Industry Keywords

Regulated EnvironmentsDatabase EnginesOperational ComplexityData IntegritySelf-Service Operations

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

CloudElasticSearchKafkaKubernetesLinuxMariaDBPostgresPythonRedisRustGo

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Review the database estate against business needs and production evidence, assessing reliability, scale, cost and operational complexity
Define target architecture, measurable goals and a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams
Execute the roadmap through design, implementation and adoption
Participate hands-on in difficult migrations and scaling decisions, using benchmarks, data-integrity checks and cutover and rollback plans
Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits across engine, storage and application behaviour
Improve fleet reliability through observability, safer changes, 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
Create safe, auditable self-service workflows with access controls and change evidence in partnership with Security and Compliance
Advise application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries and data-store choices
Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and incident analysis
Participate in on-call and incident response and follow through on production lessons

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale
Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes
Understanding of consistency and availability trade-offs, 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
Experience diagnosing MariaDB incidents, performance tuning and tested restore or point-in-time recovery
Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or a comparable language
Experience building and maintaining production software or automation for database provisioning, failover, online schema changes and self-service operations
Experience with version control, code review, delivery pipelines and tested failure handling
Strong low-level Linux, Kernel, storage and networking fundamentals
Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated delivery across teams without reporting-line authority
Experience with containerised, hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-region environments preferred
Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code or GitOps preferred
Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers preferred
Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse or internal database platforms preferred
Operational knowledge of Kafka, Redis/Valkey or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch preferred
Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database engines, operators and other infrastructure software preferred

Benefits

Comp & perks

Equity program
Bonus program
Wellness allowance
Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
401(k)
Kraken product dogfooding after joining