Principal Database Engineer

About this role

Lead the assessment and evolution of Kraken’s production database estate, setting architecture direction and delivering improvements across reliability, scale, cost, and operational complexity. This is a hands-on individual contributor role involving MariaDB systems, production automation, incident response, and cross-team technical leadership.

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, within the SRE / DevOps organization.

Stack

What you'll do

• Assess database infrastructure and define a target architecture, measurable goals, and prioritized roadmap.
• Implement and verify database migrations, scaling improvements, and other roadmap work in production.
• Diagnose MariaDB failures and performance limits; improve observability, reliability, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Build production software and safe, auditable self-service workflows for provisioning, upgrades, and maintenance.
• Partner with application teams on schemas, transactions, queries, and data-store choices.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and incident analysis.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, following through on operational lessons.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
• Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, isolation, locking, query optimization, binary logs, and GTID replication.
• Experience with high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, and transactional outbox patterns.
• Personal ownership of 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, with experience building production database automation.
• Strong Linux, kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals.
• Clear technical judgment and demonstrated cross-team delivery and mentorship.

Nice to have

• Experience with containerized, hybrid on-premises/cloud, or multi-region database environments; Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or GitOps.
• Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers such as MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database engines and infrastructure software.

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus program
• Wellness allowance
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401(k)