Principal Database Engineer

Kraken is seeking a Principal Database Engineer to join their Core Infrastructure Engineering team in the United Arab Emirates. This role is crucial for building and operating the shared data systems behind critical production services, focusing on long-term experience and technical judgment to assess, set goals, and drive improvements in their database estate.

Kraken, the parent company of Payward, is a global financial platform offering crypto, stocks, futures, staking, and payments. Founded in 2011, they are committed to accelerating the global adoption of crypto and empowering individuals with financial freedom.

This is an individual contributor role with significant influence across teams, requiring hands-on execution and mentorship. If you are passionate about building the future of open finance, apply now!

Company Overview

Kraken, founded in 2011, is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally. They offer a comprehensive range of financial services including spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services. Kraken's mission is to accelerate the global adoption of crypto, enabling financial freedom and inclusion.

Payward, the parent company, has over 15 years of experience building modern financial infrastructure. Their product lineup includes Kraken, Kraken Pro, and Krak, aiming to advance an open, global financial system.

Quick Details

• Salary Range: $161,000.00/yr - $358,900.00/yr
• Job Type: Full-time
• Experience: 8 Year+
• Qualifications: Not Specified

Key Responsibilities

• Assess the database estate against business needs, identifying areas for preservation, investment, or simplification.
• Define target architecture and measurable goals, creating and agreeing on a prioritized roadmap with engineering leads.
• Execute the roadmap through design, implementation, and adoption, staying involved in complex migrations and scaling decisions.
• Investigate and resolve difficult MariaDB failures and performance issues, improving fleet reliability through observability and robust recovery procedures.
• Build and maintain production software for database provisioning, upgrades, and maintenance, ensuring workflows are safe and auditable.
• Collaborate with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries, and data-store choices.
• Mentor engineers across the team, deepening their database expertise and fostering ownership of technical decisions.

Requirements

• 8+ years of operating and evolving production database estates at scale.
• Strong understanding of high availability, replication, and distributed database failure modes.
• Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, query optimization, and replication.
• Proven experience in MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning, and recovery procedures.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable language, with experience building production automation for database workflows.
• Strong low-level Linux, Kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals.
• Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated delivery across teams without direct authority.

Benefits

• Opportunity to influence and shape the future of open finance infrastructure.
• Work with a global team of experienced professionals in the cryptocurrency space.
• Contribute to a mission of accelerating global crypto adoption and financial inclusion.
• Engage in challenging technical problems related to large-scale database systems.
• Mentorship and professional development opportunities within a leading crypto platform.