About the Role
We are hiring a Principal Database Engineer to bring long-term experience and technical judgment to our database estate. This role involves assessing our on-premises and cloud infrastructure, which includes MariaDB at its core, alongside tools like Kafka, Redis, and Elasticsearch. The engineer will set long-term goals and direction, working hands-on to deliver measurable improvements while influencing multiple teams over several quarters.
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Key Responsibilities
- Review the existing database estate against business needs and production evidence, assessing reliability, scale, cost, and operational complexity to determine what should be preserved and where simplification would enhance performance.
- Define the target architecture and measurable goals, developing a prioritized roadmap with engineering leads and dependent teams while explaining the trade-offs, sequencing the work, and managing delivery risks.
- Execute the road map by staying involved in design, implementation, and adoption, while managing challenging migrations and scaling decisions, including creating benchmarks and maintaining data integrity.
- Investigate complex failures and performance limitations in MariaDB, enhancing fleet reliability with better observability and disaster recovery procedures.
- Build and maintain production software for database provisioning, upgrades, and routine maintenance, ensuring self-service workflows are secure and auditable.
- Collaborate with application teams on schemas, transaction boundaries, queries, and data-store choices, clarifying operational impacts and resolving cross-team dependencies.
- Mentor engineers through design reviews and incident analyses, fostering their database expertise and ownership of technical decisions.
- Participate in on-call and incident response activities, ensuring clear operational ownership and implementing lessons learned from production incidents.
What You Bring
- 8+ years of experience in operating and evolving large-scale production database estates, with demonstrated ability to assess inherited systems and deliver improvements effectively.
- Strong understanding of high availability, replication, and distributed database failure modes, with insight into consistency and availability trade-offs.
- Deep, recent hands-on expertise in MariaDB, including InnoDB, MVCC, locking, query optimization, and replication mechanisms.
- Proven track record in diagnosing MariaDB incidents, performance tuning, and managing data integrity during recovery efforts.
- Strong software engineering capabilities in Python, Go, Rust, or similar languages, with experience in building and maintaining production database workflows.
- Solid low-level knowledge of Linux, Kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals, enabling issue investigation beyond the database process.
- Excellent written communication skills, with a focus on guiding teams in sound database design and lifecycle decisions without direct authority.
Nice to Haves
- Experience with containerized, hybrid, on-premises/cloud, or multi-region environments, along with familiarity with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.
- Insight into database proxies or load-balancing layers such as MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL.
- Knowledge of other database systems like PostgreSQL, Vitess, or ScyllaDB, as well as operational knowledge of Kafka or Elasticsearch.
- Experience working in regulated environments or contributing to database engines and other infrastructure software.
Benefits and Work Environment
- We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity in our workforce. We encourage applicants to apply regardless of whether they meet all listed requirements.
- We celebrate diverse perspectives and experiences within our team and assess all candidates fairly, considering their skills, experiences, and results from any job-related assessments as part of the hiring process.
- Our commitment to inclusivity means we do not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any protected characteristics.
This position may require ongoing assessments as part of the hiring process. We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in accordance with local laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
