Senior Database Administrator – Core Infrastructure

Overview

In this role, you will scale and optimize MariaDB-based clusters to support Kraken’s global expansion and new product initiatives. You’ll join a senior DBAs/SREs team focused on reliability, security, and performance while driving automation and self-service for database operations. You’ll shape high-availability, disaster-recovery, and observability practices, contributing to a scalable, auditable platform. This is an opportunity to impact engineering velocity by building robust, reproducible deployments and strong operational patterns.

Responsibilities

• Scale and tune high-throughput MariaDB clusters for global growth
• Strengthen HA, DR, and backup strategies with design and tested procedures
• Reduce manual work via automation and standardized, safe workflows
• Improve observability and alerting quality across environments
• Enhance database security through access controls and disciplined patching
• Contribute to platform initiatives (containerization, IaC, reproducible deployments)
• Partner with service teams to optimize performance and database hygiene
• Participate in on-call rotations with a focus on preventive engineering

Key requirements

• 5+ years operating MariaDB/MySQL in high-volume production environments (tuning, replication, troubleshooting)
• Strong understanding of HA patterns, distributed DB behavior, and failure scenarios
• Hands-on experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers (HAProxy, ProxySQL, MaxScale)
• CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows; Terraform experience ideal
• Solid cloud, Linux, and networking fundamentals
• Experience with containers and Kubernetes at scale
• Strong security instincts around access control and upgrade processes
• Observability expertise: monitoring, alerting hygiene, incident readiness
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with stakeholders, documentation, and metrics

• strong communication and collaboration
• ownership and accountability
• ability to translate technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders
• MariaDB/MySQL in production
• high availability and disaster recovery
• HAProxy/ProxySQL/MaxScale

…