Principal Database Engineer - Kraken

About Kraken

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, designed to advance an open, global financial system.

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

The Team

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 center and Kafka, Redis, and Elasticsearch across the wider platform.

We are hiring a Principal Database Engineer to bring long-term experience and technical judgment to this estate. You will 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

As a Principal Database Engineer, you will:

• Review the existing database 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 on a prioritized roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams, explaining 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 behavior. 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 optimization, 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 containerized, 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.