161K–359K USD / year
Principal Database Engineer
DevOpsRemote — United Kingdom
Published on 2026-11-10
These details were extracted automatically from the original listing. They may not be complete or fully up to date — it's worth checking the original job post.
About this role
Lead the assessment and evolution of Kraken’s production database estate, with MariaDB at its core. Set technical direction and deliver reliability, performance, and operational improvements hands-on across teams.
About the company
Kraken is a leading cryptocurrency exchange that provides a platform for buying, selling, and trading a diverse range of digital assets. The company focuses on compliance, security, and innovative financial solutions to serve both individual and institutional clients.
The team
Core Infrastructure Engineering
Stack
MariaDBInnoDBKafkaRedisElasticsearchPythonGoRust
What you'll do
- Assess database reliability, scale, cost, and complexity; define target architecture and a prioritised roadmap.
- Deliver database migrations and scaling improvements with benchmarks, data-integrity checks, and rollback plans.
- Diagnose MariaDB failures and performance limits; improve observability, backup, restore, and disaster recovery.
- Build production software and safe, auditable self-service workflows for provisioning, upgrades, and maintenance.
- Advise application teams on schemas, transactions, queries, and data-store choices.
- Mentor engineers and participate in on-call and incident response.
What we're looking for
- 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
- Deep, recent MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, isolation, locking, query optimisation, binary logs, and GTID replication.
- Strong knowledge of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, and transactional outbox patterns.
- Experience owning MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning, and tested restore or point-in-time recovery.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable language, including production database automation.
- Strong Linux, kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals.
- Demonstrated ability to influence across teams and mentor experienced engineers.
Nice to have
- Experience with containerised, hybrid cloud/on-premises, or multi-region database environments.
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or GitOps.
- Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
- Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database infrastructure software.
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus