Principal Database Engineer

Role overview Set technical direction for a large production database estate and work hands-on with engineers to improve its reliability, performance, cost, and operational simplicity. This is a senior individual contributor position with influence across teams and a multi-quarter remit, centered on MariaDB alongside supporting data and infrastructure systems.

Responsibilities - Assess database systems against business needs and production evidence, then define target architecture, measurable goals, and a prioritized roadmap. - Lead roadmap execution, including difficult migrations and scaling decisions; validate changes with benchmarks, integrity checks, and safe cutover and rollback plans. - Diagnose MariaDB incidents and performance limits, and improve monitoring, backup and restore procedures, and disaster recovery through tested exercises. - Build and maintain production software for provisioning, upgrades, maintenance, and safe, auditable self-service operations. - Advise application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries, and data-store choices, making cross-team operational trade-offs clear. - Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and incident analysis; participate in on-call and follow through on production lessons.

Requirements - Eight or more years operating and evolving production database estates at scale, with experience assessing inherited systems and delivering improvements across teams. - Strong knowledge of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, consistency trade-offs, transaction boundaries, and reliable event delivery patterns. - Recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, isolation, locking, query optimization, binary logs, and GTID replication. - Direct experience diagnosing MariaDB incidents, tuning performance, and testing restore or point-in-time recovery while verifying data integrity. - Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable language, including production automation for database operations. - Strong Linux and systems knowledge, clear written technical judgment, and the ability to influence and deliver across teams without relying on management authority.

Nice to have - Experience with hybrid or multi-region infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or GitOps. - Familiarity with database proxies or load balancers, other database platforms, or operational systems such as Kafka, Redis, and Elasticsearch. - Work in regulated environments or contributions to database engines and infrastructure software.