Senior Database Administrator – Core Infrastructure

About the role

You will join a senior team of DBAs and SREs responsible for the database platform that underpins many of Kraken’s most critical services. The group focuses on scaling distributed MariaDB environments, building automation, and delivering reliable, high‑performance data solutions for a global financial platform.

Key responsibilities

• Scale and tune high‑throughput MariaDB clusters to support global expansion and new product initiatives.
• Strengthen high‑availability, disaster‑recovery and backup strategies with sound design and regular validation.
• Automate manual operational work, improve process consistency and enable low‑friction database workflows.
• Improve observability and alert quality by championing meaningful metrics and reducing noise.
• Enhance database security through robust access controls, disciplined patching and secure operational patterns.
• Contribute to modern platform initiatives such as containerised environments, infrastructure‑as‑code workflows and reproducible deployments.
• Partner with service teams to drive performance patterns, operational readiness and database hygiene across the engineering organization.
• Participate in on‑call rotations with a focus on predictability, high‑quality signal and preventative engineering.

Required profile

• 5+ years operating MariaDB/MySQL in high‑volume production, 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, etc.).
• Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps and infrastructure‑as‑code workflows (Terraform ideal).
• Solid cloud, Linux and networking fundamentals.
• Experience with containers and orchestration platforms (Kubernetes) at scale.
• Strong security instincts around access control, upgrades and safe operational workflows.
• Observability expertise: monitoring, alerting hygiene and readiness for incident response.

Required skills

• MariaDB / MySQL
• HAProxy / ProxySQL / MaxScale
• Terraform
• Kubernetes
• Linux
• Python or Rust (nice to have)
• ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI
• CI/CD pipelines