Principal Database Engineer

Accountabilities

• Assess existing database infrastructure against business needs and production performance, identifying opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, cost efficiency, and operational simplicity.

• Define target database architecture, establish measurable technical objectives, and develop a prioritized roadmap in collaboration with engineering leaders and dependent teams.

• Lead the implementation and adoption of architectural improvements, remaining hands-on with complex migrations, scaling decisions, benchmarking, data-integrity validation, and cutover and rollback planning.

• Diagnose complex MariaDB performance issues and failures across database engines, storage systems, and application layers.

• Improve production reliability through observability, safer change management, and tested backup, restoration, and disaster recovery procedures.

• Establish recovery objectives with service owners and validate them through practical recovery exercises.

• Build and maintain production software and automation for database provisioning, upgrades, failover, online schema changes, and routine maintenance.

• Develop secure, auditable self-service database workflows in partnership with Security and Compliance teams.

• Advise application teams on schema design, transaction boundaries, query optimization, and appropriate data-store choices.

• Mentor engineers through design reviews, technical collaboration, pairing, and incident analysis, encouraging ownership and stronger database expertise.

• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response, ensuring clear operational ownership and continuous improvement based on production lessons.

Requirements:

• At least 8 years of experience operating and evolving large-scale production database environments, including assessing existing systems, defining technical direction, and delivering measurable improvements.

• Deep, recent, hands-on expertise with MariaDB, particularly InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, query optimization, binary logs, and MariaDB GTID replication.

• Strong understanding of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, consistency and availability trade-offs, transaction boundaries, and reliable event delivery patterns such as transactional outbox.

• Proven experience independently diagnosing MariaDB incidents, tuning performance, and executing tested restore or point-in-time recovery procedures while validating data integrity.

• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable programming language.

• Experience personally developing and maintaining production software or automation for database provisioning, failover, online schema changes, and self-service operations.

• Familiarity with version control, code reviews, delivery pipelines, and robust failure-handling practices.

• Strong knowledge of Linux internals, operating system kernels, storage, and networking, with the ability to investigate issues beyond the database layer.

• Excellent written communication and technical judgment, with a demonstrated ability to influence stakeholders and deliver cross-team initiatives without direct reporting authority.

• Proven ability to mentor experienced engineers and support sound technical and lifecycle decisions.

• Nice to have: Experience with containerized, hybrid on-premises and cloud, or multi-region database environments, including Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and GitOps.

• Nice to have: Familiarity with database proxies and load-balancing technologies such as MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL.

• Nice to have: Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, or internal database platforms, as well as Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.

• Nice to have: Experience working in regulated environments or contributing to database engines, operators, and infrastructure software.

Benefits:

• Competitive annual salary range of USD 161,000–358,900, with the final offer determined by experience, skills, and role scope.

• Equity opportunities.

• Performance-based bonus program.

• Wellness allowance.

• For eligible US employees, additional medical, dental, and vision coverage, as well as a 401(k) plan.

• Fully remote, full-time employment arrangement.

• Opportunity to influence critical infrastructure and contribute to complex, high-impact engineering initiatives.