Principal Database Engineer

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, Ninja Trader, 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, built 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 across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

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.

• 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.

• 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates  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…