Senior Database Administrator

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Building the Future of Crypto. Our Krakenites are a world‑class team with crypto conviction, united by our desire to discover and unlock the potential of crypto and blockchain technology.

Kraken is a mission‑focused company rooted in crypto values. As a Krakenite, you’ll join us on our mission to accelerate the global adoption of crypto, so that everyone can achieve financial freedom and inclusion. For over a decade, Kraken’s focus on our mission and crypto ethos has attracted many of the most talented crypto experts in the world.

As a fully remote company, we have Krakenites in 70+ countries who speak over 50 languages.

You’ll join a senior team of DBAs and SREs responsible for the database platform that underpins many of Kraken’s most critical services. This group combines deep operational expertise with a platform mindset, designing systems that allow engineering teams to innovate quickly while maintaining strong guarantees around performance, security, and reliability.

The team is entering an exciting phase of evolution as Kraken continues to expand globally. Over the next year, we are focused on strengthening our operational excellence, evolving our database environments to support significant future scale, and increasing automation and self‑service so that database operations become more efficient, at scale.

• Scale and tune high‑throughput Maria
  
  DB clusters to support continued global expansion and new product initiatives.
• Strengthen high‑availability, disaster‑recovery, and backup approaches through sound design and regularly validated procedures.
• Reduce manual operational work by building automation, improving process consistency, and enabling safe, low‑friction database workflows.
• Improve observability and alert quality by championing meaningful metrics, reducing noise, and ensuring operational clarity across environments.
• Enhance database security through robust access controls, disciplined patching and upgrade practices, and secure operational patterns.
• Contribute to modern platform initiatives, including containerized environments, infrastructure‑as‑code workflows, and reproducible deployments.
• Partner with service teams to drive better performance patterns, operational readiness, and database hygiene across the engineering organization.
• Participate in our on‑call rotations with a long‑term focus on making on‑call predictable, informed by high‑quality signal and preventative engineering.

• 5+ years operating Maria
  
  DB/MySQL in high‑volume production environments, including tuning, replication, and troubleshooting.
• Strong understanding of high‑availability patterns, distributed database behavior, and practical failure scenarios.
• Hands‑on experience with database proxies or load‑balancing layers (HAProxy, Proxy
  
  SQL, Max Scale, or similar).
• Practical experience with CI/CD, Git Ops, and Infrastructure‑as‑Code workflows (Terraform experience ideal).
• Solid cloud, Linux, and networking fundamentals.
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms (building container images and managing Kubernetes workloads at scale).
• Strong security instincts around access control, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows.
• Observability expertise: monitoring, alerting hygiene, and readiness for incident response.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to partner with stakeholders, negotiate long‑term plans, write formal documentation and tie success to specific metrics and KPIs.

• Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, or reliability programs.
• Strong scripting or programming ability (Python or Rust preferred) used to build automation and internal tools.
• Hands‑on experience with Git Ops tooling (ArgoCD, Git Hub Actions, Git Lab CI).
• Exposure to multi‑region or disaster‑recovery designs.
• Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. Whether that’s based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state or local laws.

This job is accepting ongoing applications and there is no Final date to receive applications.

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