Principal Database Engineer

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

• 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.

• Define the target architecture and measurable goals. Agree a prioritised roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams, explaining the 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 behaviour. 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 optimisation, 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 containerised, 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.

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