Principal Database Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Evaluate the database infrastructure against business requirements and production data, analyzing reliability, scalability, cost, and operational complexity.

• Identify systems that need preservation and areas where investment or simplification could enhance outcomes.

• Establish target architecture, measurable objectives, and a prioritized roadmap in collaboration with engineering leads and related teams.

• Articulate trade-offs, sequence tasks to mitigate delivery risks, and modify plans as new evidence emerges.

• Implement roadmap initiatives through design, execution, and adoption processes.

• Engage in complex migrations and scaling decisions using benchmarks, data integrity assessments, and cutover and rollback strategies.

• Confirm results in production prior to finalization.

• Analyze MariaDB failures and performance limitations by examining engine, storage, and application behavior.

• Enhance fleet reliability through improved observability, safer changes, and tested backup, restore, and disaster recovery protocols.

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

• Develop and sustain production software for database provisioning, upgrades, and routine maintenance tasks.

• Create secure and auditable self-service workflows with access controls and change documentation in conjunction with Security and Compliance.

• Provide guidance to application teams regarding schemas, transaction boundaries, queries, and data store selections.

• Address cross-team dependencies and elucidate operational implications.

• Mentor engineers through design evaluations, collaborative work, and incident analysis.

• Participate in on-call duties and incident response, ensuring follow-through on lessons learned from production incidents.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 8 years of experience managing and evolving production database environments at scale.

• In-depth knowledge of high availability, replication, and distributed database failure modes.

• Understanding of trade-offs between consistency and availability, transaction boundaries, and reliable event delivery, including transactional outbox patterns.

• Extensive, recent hands-on experience with MariaDB, covering InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, query optimization, binary logs, and MariaDB GTID replication.

• Personal accountability for diagnosing MariaDB incidents, performance tuning, and conducting tested restore or point-in-time recovery.

• Proficient in software engineering with skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a similar language.

• Experience in building and maintaining production software or automation for database workflows, including provisioning, failover, online schema modifications, and self-service operations.

• Familiarity with version control, code reviews, and delivery pipelines, alongside tested failure handling procedures.

• Strong foundational knowledge of low-level Linux, Kernel, storage, and networking.

• Ability to articulate clear written technical judgments and demonstrate effective delivery across teams without direct reporting authority.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or GitOps, including operational trade-offs [nice to have].

• Experience with database proxies or load-balancing solutions such as MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL [nice to have].

• Experience with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, or internal database platforms; operational awareness of Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch [nice to have].

• Background in regulated environments or contributions to database engines, operators, and other infrastructure software [nice to have].

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity program

• Bonus program

• Wellness allowance

• Medical benefits [US Only]

• Dental benefits [US Only]

• Vision benefits [US Only]

• 401(k) benefits [US Only]