Principal Database Engineer

About the Role

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 result

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Strong problem solving foundations, knowledge of modern engineering practices, and interest in technology systems.

Perks & Benefits

• Official mentor support
• verified hiring timeline
• and career progression.