Building the Future of Open Finance

Payward - 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 Team

Founded 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

• Architecture & Strategy: 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.
• Roadmap Execution: Define the target architecture and measurable goals. Agree a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams, explaining trade-offs and sequencing work around delivery risks.
• Hands-on Delivery: 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/rollback plans.
• Reliability & Troubleshooting: Investigate difficult MariaDB failures and performance limits through the engine, storage and application behavior. Improve fleet reliability through useful observability, safer changes and tested disaster recovery procedures.
• Automation & Provisioning: 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.
• Collaboration: Work with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries and data-store choices. Make operational consequences clear and resolve dependencies that span teams.
• Mentorship: Mentor engineers across the team through design reviews, pairing and incident analysis, helping them deepen their database expertise.
• Incident Response: Participate in on-call and incident response, leaving clear operational ownership and following through on lessons from production.

What You Bring

• Experience: 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale, with a proven track record of assessing inherited systems and delivering technical direction.
• Distributed Systems: Strong understanding of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, consistency/availability trade-offs, and reliable event delivery.
• MariaDB Expertise: Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise including InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, query optimisation, binary logs and MariaDB GTID replication.
• Incident Management: Personal ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning and tested restore or point-in-time recovery.
• Software Engineering: Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust or a comparable language, with experience building production software and automation for database workflows.
• Fundamentals: Strong low-level Linux, kernel, storage and networking fundamentals.
• Communication: Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated delivery across teams without reporting-line authority.

Nice to Haves

• Experience operating databases in containerised, hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-region environments (Kubernetes, IaC, GitOps).
• Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers (MaxScale, HAProxy, ProxySQL).
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, or operational knowledge of Kafka, Redis/Valkey, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database engines and infrastructure software.