Principal Database Engineer
Payward, Inc. is the parent company and operating platform behind Kraken and a portfolio spanning trading, custody, payments, lending, tokenized assets, onchain finance, and benchmarks.
Funding history
Investors
Projects
About Payward, Inc.
Payward operates unified financial infrastructure across crypto and traditional markets, including shared liquidity, risk and margin systems, collateral and settlement, compliance, and licensing. Its first-party portfolio includes Kraken, Kraken Pro, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, CF Benchmarks, Reap, Krak, Kraken Prime, Kraken OTC, Kraken Custody, and Bitnomial.
Skills
Candidate Availability
About the Role
You will assess the database estate, define target architecture and measurable goals, and execute the roadmap hands-on with the team. You will investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits, improve reliability and disaster recovery, build database automation, advise application teams, mentor engineers and take part in on-call.
Requirements
- 8+ years operating production database estates at scale
- Strong understanding of high availability, replication and distributed database failure modes
- Deep MariaDB expertise including InnoDB, MVCC, locking, binary logs and GTID replication
- Ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, tuning and recovery
- Strong software engineering in Python, Go, Rust or similar
- Strong Linux, kernel, storage and networking fundamentals
- Clear written technical judgment and cross-team delivery
Responsibilities
- Review the database estate for reliability, scale, cost and complexity
- Define target architecture and a prioritised roadmap
- Execute migrations and scaling work with benchmarks and rollback plans
- Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits
- Improve observability, backup, restore and disaster recovery
- Build production software for provisioning, upgrades and maintenance
- Advise application teams on schemas, transactions and queries
- Mentor engineers
- Participate in on-call and incident response
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus program
- Wellness allowance
- Medical, dental, vision and 401(k) (US only)