Principal Database Engineer

Building the Future of Open FinancePayward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.
The teamFounded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.
Kraken's Core Infrastructure Engineering team builds and operates the shared data systems behind critical production services. Our estate spans on-premises and cloud infrastructure, with MariaDB at its centre and Kafka, Redis and Elasticsearch across the wider platform.
We're hiring a Principal Database Engineer to bring long-term experience and technical judgment to this estate. You'll assess it, set the goals and direction, and work hands-on with the team to deliver measurable improvements. This is an individual contributor role with influence across teams and several quarters of work.
The opportunity
Review the estate against business needs and production evidence. Judge reliability, scale, cost and operational complexity, identifying what should be preserved and where investment or simplification would make a difference.
Define the target architecture and measurable goals. Agree a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams, explaining the trade-offs and sequencing work around delivery risks.
Execute that roadmap with the team through design, implementation and adoption. Stay personally involved in difficult migrations and scaling decisions, with representative benchmarks, data-integrity checks and credible cutover and rollback plans. Adapt the plan as evidence changes and verify the results in production before calling the work complete.
Investigate difficult MariaDB failures and performance limits through the engine, storage and application behaviour. Improve fleet reliability through useful observability, safer changes and tested backup, restore and disaster recovery procedures. Set recovery objectives with service owners and prove 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. Make the operational consequences clear and resolve dependencies that span teams.
Mentor engineers across the team through design reviews, pairing and incident analysis. Help 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. You have assessed inherited systems, set technical direction and delivered improvements with engineering teams, and can explain how those decisions held up over time.
Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes. You can 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. You can explain the mechanisms and diagnostic evidence behind your decisions.
Personal ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning and tested restore or point-in-time recovery. You can explain what you did, how you established data integrity and what remained uncertain.
Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or a comparable language. You have personally built and maintained 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, with tested failure handling.
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. You 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 (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.
Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.
Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
Our commitmentPayward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.
We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.
As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.
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Compensation Range: $161K - $358.9K
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