About this role
Salary: £47,000 - 87,000 per year
Requirements: Were looking for 5+ years of experience 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 such as HAProxy, ProxySQL, or MaxScale.Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows; Terraform experience is ideal.Solid cloud, Linux, and networking fundamentals.Experience with containers and orchestration platforms, including building container images and managing Kubernetes workloads at scale.Strong security instincts around access control, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows.Observability expertise, including monitoring, alerting hygiene, and incident-response readiness.Strong communication and collaboration skills, including partnering with stakeholders, negotiating long-term plans, writing formal documentation, and tying success to specific metrics and KPIs.Nice to have: Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, or reliability programs.Nice to have: Strong scripting or programming ability, preferably Python or Rust, used to build automation and internal tools.Nice to have: Hands-on experience with GitOps tools such as ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI.Nice to have: Exposure to multi-region or disaster-recovery designs.Nice to have: Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems. Responsibilities: Scale and tune high-throughput MariaDB clusters to support our 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 platform initiatives, including containerized environments, Infrastructure-as-Code workflows, and reproducible deployments.Partner with service teams to improve performance patterns, operational readiness, and database hygiene across our engineering organization.Participate in our on-call rotations, with a long-term focus on making on-call predictable through high-quality signals and preventative engineering. Technologies: ArgoCDCI/CDCloudGitHubGitLabGitOpsSupportKubernetesLinuxMariaDBMySQLPythonRustSecurityTerraform More:
Payward, the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks, has spent 15 years building globally accessible financial infrastructure to advance an open financial system. Youll join our senior team of DBAs and SREs, which operates the database platform underpinning many of Krakens critical services. Were evolving our platform to support global growth, future scale, greater automation, and more self-service. This is a collaborative, high-ownership environment focused on distributed systems and auditable workflows. The role is full-time and remote, based in Europe, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, or the United Kingdom, within our Engineering, Core Infrastructure department. We welcome applications from people who may not meet every listed requirement, hire based on merit, and are committed to equal opportunity. We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, may use job-related assessments as part of our hiring process, and accept applications on an ongoing basis unless a deadline is stated.
last updated 40 week of 2026