Senior Database Platform Engineer

Our Krakenites are a world-class team with crypto conviction, united by our desire to discover and unlock the potential of crypto and blockchain technology.

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Kraken is a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values. As a Krakenite, you’ll join us on our mission to accelerate the global adoption of crypto, so that everyone can achieve financial freedom and inclusion. For over a decade, Kraken’s focus on our mission and crypto ethos has attracted many of the most talented crypto experts in the world.

Before you apply, please read the Kraken Culture page to learn more about our internal culture, values, and mission. We also expect candidates to familiarize themselves with the Kraken app. Learn how to create a Kraken account here.

As a fully remote company, we have Krakenites in 70+ countries who speak over 50 languages. Krakenites are industry pioneers who develop premium crypto products for experienced traders, institutions, and newcomers to the space. Kraken is committed to industry-leading security, crypto education, and world-class client support through our products like Kraken Pro, Desktop, Wallet, and Kraken Futures.

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Core Infrastructure – Data Systems builds and runs the shared data systems that other engineering teams rely on to ship production services safely and quickly, and scale them globally.

We operate technologies such as MariaDB, Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, and adjacent tooling with a very high operational bar.

This team is not only responsible for keeping critical systems healthy. We also build the abstractions, guardrails, and automation that let internal teams provision resources, and evolve their data access patterns. We work closely with our internal customers and aim to stay ahead of their needs.

We are hiring a Senior Database Platform Engineer to help us operate and evolve this platform.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role for someone who is comfortable owning production-grade stateful systems, writing software to remove toil, improving observability and incident prevention, and partnering directly with other engineers on data-system design and performance.

• Own the reliability, availability, performance, capacity, backup/restore, disaster recovery, and security posture of shared data systems.

• Operate and improve platforms such as Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, MariaDB and other NoSQL databases with tight SLAs.

• Build and maintain high-touch abstractions and self-service workflows for provisioning, schema evolution, common operational changes, and routine maintenance.

• Use programming and AI-assisted workflows to automate repetitive work, improve diagnostics, raise documentation quality, and shorten time-to-resolution during incidents.

• Implement, deploy, operate, and improve satellite tools that improve our platform and increase our operational leverage.

• Partner closely with internal engineering teams on data access patterns, query optimization, schema design, operational readiness, and safe adoption of shared infrastructure.

• Improve observability, alerting, SLOs, runbooks, and operational reviews so that systems are easier to understand and incidents are less likely to happen.

• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response.

• Strong hands-on experience operating production-grade stateful or distributed systems.

• Solid software engineering skills in a language such as Python, Rust, Go, or similar, with a clear track record of automating infrastructure or operations work.

• Experience deploying and operating tools and services in production.

• Practical Kubernetes experience, especially around stateful workloads, upgrades, storage, and failure modes.

• Strong Linux, networking, and systems troubleshooting fundamentals.

• Experience with observability, alerting, incident response, and post-incident improvement.

• MariaDB / PostgreSQL

• Kafka

• Redis / Valkey

• Elasticsearch / OpenSearch

• MongoDB, ClickHouse, Cassandra, or similar NoSQL / distributed data systems

• Terraform, GitOps, CI/CD, operators, or other automation-heavy infrastructure patterns

• Query tuning, schema design, replication, clustering, or high-availability design

• Data engineering or pipeline-adjacent technologies such as CDC, Kafka Connect, Flink, or similar

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

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.

Kraken is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate all Krakenites for their diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions and unique perspectives. We hire strictly based on merit, meaning we seek out the candidates with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills considered the most suitable for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgable about crypto!

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments are designed to evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Assessment results are considered alongside other relevant information, such as experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

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. 

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