Principal Database Engineer

Role overview

Set technical direction for a large, established production database environment and work hands-on with engineers to improve its reliability, performance, scale, cost, and operational simplicity. This principal-level individual contributor assesses existing systems, defines a measurable roadmap, and guides its delivery across teams over several quarters. The work centers on MariaDB, alongside supporting data infrastructure.

Responsibilities

- Assess database systems against business needs and production evidence, then define a target architecture, priorities, and measurable outcomes with engineering partners. - Lead delivery of database improvements, remaining hands-on with complex migrations and scaling decisions; use benchmarks, data integrity checks, and tested cutover and rollback plans. - Diagnose difficult MariaDB reliability and performance issues, and strengthen observability, backups, restores, and disaster recovery through tested procedures and exercises. - Build and maintain production tools for provisioning, upgrades, failover, schema changes, and routine database operations, with safe and auditable self-service workflows. - Advise application teams on schemas, transactions, queries, and data-store choices, and resolve dependencies across teams. - Mentor engineers through reviews, pairing, and incident analysis; participate in on-call response and follow through on operational lessons.

Requirements

- Eight or more years operating and evolving production database estates at scale, including setting technical direction and delivering improvements with engineering teams. - Deep, recent MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, isolation, locking, query optimization, binary logs, and GTID replication. - Strong grasp of high availability, replication, distributed database failures, consistency and availability trade-offs, transaction boundaries, and reliable event delivery patterns. - Personal experience diagnosing MariaDB incidents, tuning performance, and testing restore or point-in-time recovery while verifying data integrity. - Strong software engineering ability in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable language, including production automation for database workflows and failure handling. - Strong Linux, clear technical judgment, and the ability to influence decisions across teams without direct authority.

Nice to have

- Experience with containerized, hybrid, or multi-region databases; Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or GitOps. - Familiarity with database proxies, other database systems, Kafka, Redis or Valkey, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch. - Work in regulated environments or contributions to database engines and infrastructure software.