Senior Database Administrator - Core Infrastructure at Kraken

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. Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work. The team You’ll join a senior team of DBAs and SREs responsible for the database platform that underpins many of Kraken’s most critical services. This group combines deep operational expertise with a platform mindset, designing systems that allow engineering teams to innovate quickly while maintaining strong guarantees around performance, security, and reliability. The team is entering an exciting phase of evolution as Kraken continues to expand globally. Over the next year, we are focused on strengthening our operational excellence, evolving our database environments to support significant future scale, and increasing automation and self-service so that database operations become more efficient, at scale. This is not a traditional “keep the lights on” DBA team. Our work centers on scaling distributed MariaDB environments, shaping reliable patterns for high-traffic systems, and transforming operational knowledge into automated, auditable workflows that uplift the entire engineering organization. It’s a collaborative, high-ownership environment where clarity, rigor, and continuous improvement are part of how we operate. If you enjoy building robust distributed systems and designing platforms that make engineering teams faster and safer by default, you’ll find a strong home here. The opportunity 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 our on-call rotations with a long-term focus on making on-call predictable, informed by high-quality signal and preventative engineering. What you Bring 5+ years operating MariaDB/MySQL in high-volume production environments, including tuning, replication, and troubleshoot