Principal Database Engineer

United States

Actively hiring, first seen by us 4 hours ago

Pay: Pay not listedSimilar roles state $127K–$190K
Work setting: Remote — work setting source
Work setup in the employer’s posting: Remote
From the employer’s posting
Employment: Full-time — employment source
Employment type in the employer’s posting: FullTime
From the employer’s posting

What you’ll work on

Full posting

See the full posting for the role’s responsibilities.

People management: Individual contributor stated — people management source
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
Read the full posting

What you’ll bring

All qualifications

Core experience

8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
Experience operating databases in containerised, hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-region environments.
Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes.
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.

Qualification wording

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apply at Kraken

Posting record

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Actively hiringFirst seen by us today, still listed, and not a repost of an earlier posting.

Status in our records: Live
First seen by us: Nov 12, 2026today
Recorded sightings: 1

These dates show when we found the posting. Check the employer’s website to confirm it is still accepting applications.

How this job compares

Pay

$127K–$190K is typical

The middle half of what similar US postings state. This one doesn’t list pay.

From 2,239 postings in the last year. Stated ranges, not salaries paid.

Time since we first saw it

Day 0

Early. Similar jobs usually come down between day 6 and day 55.

At Kraken, jobs usually come down by about day 41.

From 13,214 similar postings that came down, and 9 of Kraken’s. Coming down is not always a hire.

Kraken is hiring

7 open jobs

Open jobs by the week we first saw them, last 12 weeks.

Hiring is picking up
Takes jobs down quickly

Hiring record

See how this role fits your experience

Add your resume and we’ll mark which of these tools you already use, and point out anything in the posting that could rule you out.

Python
Rust
ClickHouse
Elasticsearch
Kafka
Kubernetes
PostgreSQL
Redis
Go

Where the posting names them

- 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.

- 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.

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.

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).

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Has Kraken posted this job before?

Yes. We’ve followed one other Principal Database Engineer job there since November 2026. It is still up.

LondonStill up after 1 day, first seen Nov 11
This jobUp 0 days so far, first seen Nov 12

Demand for Data Engineer roles

New Data Engineer postings at the employers we follow are up 7% over the last 6 weeks compared with the 6 before.

August 17Last week

Each bar is one week of new postings. The darkest bars are the last 6 weeks.

Counted from the hiring pages we’ve followed for at least five weeks, so employers we add don’t look like growth. Updated weekly.

About the role

We file this job under Data Engineer, by the work the posting describes.

Data engineers build and run the pipelines that copy data out of apps and outside services into a warehouse or lake, and fix them when a source changes or a load fails.

Expect SQL, Python, a cloud platform, a scheduler such as Airflow, and often tools for large data such as Spark or Kafka.

An analytics engineer works one step later, turning the raw data a data engineer lands into clean tables people can query.

US government figures for database architects

Median yearly pay, May 2025: $139,500
Expected change, 2025 to 2035: 9.4% more jobsagainst 3.5% for all jobs

The government has no code for data engineers, so these figures are for the closest group, database architects, which includes data integration and data warehousing specialists.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (May 2025) and Employment Projections (2025 to 2035). Occupation code 15-1243.

Job description

View original posting ↗

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, global financial system.

The team

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.

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.

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

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 graduation from an educational institution.

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.

Our commitment

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether 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.

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