Building the Future of Open Finance Payward
- the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, 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, general 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. Review the estate against business needs and production evidence. 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. 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 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. 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. ~ You help stakeholders make sound database design and lifecycle decisions, and develop experienced engineers through shared delivery. 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. Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduati

📌 Principal Database Engineer (España)
🏢 Kraken
📍 España