Database Administrator

About the company

• Kraken — cryptocurrency exchange
• Full-time position
• Remote (only from: United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Romania, Cyprus, Switzerland, Portugal, Lithuania, South Africa, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, Bulgaria)

Responsibilities

• Scale and tune high-throughput MariaDB clusters to support continued global expansion and new product initiatives
• Strengthen high-availability, disaster-recovery, and backup approaches through sound design and regularly validated procedures
• Reduce manual operational work by building automation, improving process consistency, and enabling safe, low-friction database workflows
• Improve observability and alert quality by championing meaningful metrics, reducing noise, and ensuring operational clarity across environments
• Enhance database security through robust access controls, disciplined patching and upgrade practices, and secure operational patterns
• Contribute to modern platform initiatives, including containerized environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, and reproducible deployments
• Partner with service teams to drive better performance patterns, operational readiness, and database hygiene across the engineering organization
• Participate in on-call rotations with a long-term focus on making on-call predictable

Requirements

• 5+ years operating MariaDB/MySQL in high-volume production environments, including tuning, replication, and troubleshooting
• Strong understanding of high-availability patterns, distributed database behavior, and practical failure scenarios
• Hands-on experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers (HAProxy, ProxySQL, MaxScale, or similar)
• Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows (Terraform experience ideal)
• Solid cloud, Linux, and networking fundamentals
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms (building container images and managing Kubernetes workloads at scale)
• Strong security instincts around access control, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows
• Observability expertise: monitoring, alerting hygiene, and readiness for incident response
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Nice to have: Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, or reliability programs
• Nice to have: Strong scripting or programming ability (Python or Rust preferred)
• Nice to have: Hands-on experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI)
• Nice to have: Exposure to multi-region or disaster-recovery designs
• Nice to have: Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems