Senior Database Administrator – Kraken
Location: London, England, United Kingdom
About the Team
We’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.
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.
Skills You Should HODL
* 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 with the ability to partner with stakeholders, negotiate long‑term plans, write formal documentation and tie success to specific metrics and KPIs.
Nice to Haves
* Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, or reliability programs.
* Strong scripting or programming ability (Python or Rust preferred) used to build automation and internal tools.
* Hands‑on experience with GitOps tooling (ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
* Exposure to multi‑region or disaster‑recovery designs.
* Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems.
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
As an equal opportunity employer, we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. Whether that’s based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state or local laws.
We also welcome candidates who may not fully meet all listed requirements but are passionate about crypto or have relevant experience.
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