Principal Database Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, which manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Principal Database Engineer based in Canada .
As a Principal Database Engineer, you will shape the architecture, reliability, and long-term evolution of critical database infrastructure supporting high-demand financial services. You will assess complex production environments, define technical direction, and lead the delivery of improvements that strengthen performance, scalability, and operational resilience. Working hands-on with MariaDB and complementary data technologies, you will guide challenging migrations, resolve complex incidents, and develop automation for safer database operations. You will collaborate with engineering, security, and compliance teams, influencing decisions across the organization without relying on formal management authority. This is a senior individual contributor opportunity for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strategic judgment, practical execution, and a strong commitment to dependable infrastructure.
Accountabilities
Assess existing database infrastructure against business needs and production performance, identifying opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and operational simplicity.
Define target database architecture, establish measurable technical objectives, and develop a prioritized roadmap in collaboration with engineering leaders and dependent teams.
Lead the implementation and adoption of architectural improvements, remaining hands-on with complex migrations, scaling decisions, benchmarking, data-integrity validation, and cutover and rollback planning.
Diagnose complex MariaDB performance issues and failures across database engines, storage systems, and application layers.
Improve production reliability through observability, safer change management, and tested backup, restoration, and disaster recovery procedures.
Establish recovery objectives with service owners and validate them through practical recovery exercises.
Build and maintain production software and automation for database provisioning, upgrades, failover, online schema changes, and routine maintenance.
Develop secure, auditable self-service database workflows in partnership with Security and Compliance teams.
Advise application teams on schema design, transaction boundaries, query optimization, and appropriate data-store choices.
Mentor engineers through design reviews, technical collaboration, pairing, and incident analysis, encouraging ownership and stronger database expertise.
Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, ensuring clear operational ownership and continuous improvement based on production lessons.
Requirements
At least 8 years of experience operating and evolving large-scale production database environments, including assessing existing systems, defining technical direction, and delivering measurable improvements.
Deep, recent, hands-on expertise with MariaDB, particularly InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, query optimization, binary logs, and MariaDB GTID replication.
Strong understanding of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, consistency and availability trade-offs, transaction boundaries, and reliable event delivery patterns such as transactional outbox.
Proven experience independently diagnosing MariaDB incidents, tuning performance, and executing tested restore or point-in-time recovery procedures while validating data integrity.
Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable programming language.
Experience personally developing and maintaining production software or automation for database provisioning, failover, online schema changes, and self-service operations.
Familiarity with version control, code reviews, delivery pipelines, and robust failure-handling practices.
Strong knowledge of Linux internals, operating system kernels, storage, and networking, with the ability to investigate issues beyond the database layer.
Excellent written communication and technical judgment, with a demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and deliver cross-team initiatives without direct reporting authority.
Proven ability to mentor experienced engineers and support sound technical and lifecycle decisions.
Nice to have: Experience with containerized, hybrid on-premises and cloud, or multi-region database environments, including Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and GitOps.
Nice to have: Familiarity with database proxies and load-balancing technologies such as MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL.
Nice to have: Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, or internal database platforms, as well as Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
Nice to have: Experience working in regulated environments or contributing to database engines, operators, and infrastructure software.
Benefits
Competitive annual salary range of USD 161,000–358,900, with the final offer determined by experience, skills, and role scope.
Equity opportunities.
Performance-based bonus program.
Wellness allowance.
For eligible US employees, additional medical, dental, and vision coverage, as well as a 401(k) plan.
Fully remote, full-time employment arrangement.
Opportunity to influence critical infrastructure and contribute to complex, high-impact engineering initiatives.
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