2 hours ago
USA (city not specified)Staff+
Base Salary
$161k - $359k/yr
Responsibilities
- Assess the database estate for reliability, scale, cost, and operational complexity, and identify opportunities for investment or simplification.
- Define target architecture, measurable goals, and a prioritized roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams.
- Design and implement database migrations, scaling improvements, benchmarks, data-integrity checks, cutover plans, and rollback procedures.
- Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits across the database engine, storage, and application layers.
- Improve fleet reliability through observability, safer changes, tested backup and restore procedures, and disaster recovery exercises.
- Build and maintain production software and self-service workflows for database provisioning, upgrades, failover, online schema changes, and routine maintenance.
- Partner with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries, and data-store choices.
- Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and incident analysis.
- Participate in on-call and incident response and follow through on production lessons.
Requirements
- 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
- Deep recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including 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.
- Experience diagnosing MariaDB incidents, tuning performance, and testing restore or point-in-time recovery while validating data integrity.
- Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable language, including production database automation with version control, code review, delivery pipelines, and tested failure handling.
- Strong Linux, kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals.
- Ability to provide technical judgment, deliver across teams without reporting-line authority, and develop experienced engineers.
- Preferred experience with containerized, hybrid on-premises/cloud, or multi-region database environments.
- Preferred familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, GitOps, MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL.
- Preferred experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis or Valkey, Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, database engines, operators, infrastructure software, or regulated environments.
Benefits
- Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis unless a specific deadline is stated.
- The role includes on-call and incident-response participation.
- Payward is an equal opportunity employer committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace.
Tech Stack
Categories
Data Engineering
About Kraken
Kraken builds a global digital asset trading platform for individuals and institutions, offering spot, margin, futures, staking, OTC, and related infrastructure. The company generates revenue primarily from trading and financing fees and institutional services. Founded in 2011 and operated by privately held Payward, it is remote-first and serves customers worldwide; it has published cryptographic Proof of Reserves since 2014 to verify client asset holdings.