Senior Database Administrator

Kraken is a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values, aiming to accelerate the global adoption of crypto for financial freedom and inclusion. It is a fully remote company with employees in over 70 countries, developing premium crypto products for traders, institutions, and newcomers. The team responsible for this role includes senior DBAs, SREs, and platform engineers managing database and vector data platforms behind Kraken's critical services, focusing on PostgreSQL operational excellence, vector data capabilities, and automation.

• 5+ years operating PostgreSQL in high-volume production environments including performance tuning, replication, backup/restore, upgrades, and incident troubleshooting
• Strong understanding of PostgreSQL internals and operations: MVCC, transaction isolation, locks, WAL, checkpoints, autovacuum, bloat, statistics, query planner behavior, partitioning, and index strategy
• Hands-on experience with high availability and read scaling: streaming replication, replication slots, failover, lag management, PITR, backups, and disaster-recovery drills
• Experience with connection pooling and traffic management for PostgreSQL, especially PgBouncer, HAProxy, Kubernetes service routing, or similar
• Practical VectorDB or vector search experience such as pgvector, Qdrant, Milvus, Weaviate, OpenSearch vector search, or similar
• Ability to reason about vector index types and operational tradeoffs including HNSW/IVFFlat-style indexes, recall, latency, memory, ingestion throughput, metadata filters, rebuilds, and versioned embeddings
• Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows; Terraform experience is ideal
• Solid cloud, Linux, storage, 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, credential lifecycle, encryption, auditability, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows
• Observability expertise including monitoring, alerting hygiene, SLOs, dashboards, query-level visibility, and incident response readiness
• Strong communication and collaboration skills to partner with stakeholders, negotiate plans, write documentation, and tie success to metrics and KPIs

Nice to haves:

• Experience with SRE methodologies such as error budgets, operational reviews, reliability programs, and failure exercises
• Strong scripting or programming ability, preferably Python, Go, or Rust, for automation and internal tools
• Hands-on experience with GitOps tooling such as ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI
• Exposure to multi-region, multi-datacenter, or active/passive disaster-recovery designs
• Experience supporting AI, retrieval, personalization, fraud, search, or recommendation systems relying on embeddings or hybrid search
• Interest in cryptocurrency or decentralized systems

The opportunity:

• Design, develop, and maintain high-quality applications using React
• Scale and tune high-throughput PostgreSQL clusters supporting global expansion and new products
• Own PostgreSQL reliability fundamentals including WAL behavior, checkpoints, autovacuum, query planning, locking, replication lag, backup/restore, and capacity planning
• Build and operate vector data capabilities such as pgvector and dedicated VectorDB platforms
• Define production patterns for embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor indexes, metadata filtering, recall/latency tradeoffs, reindexing, data freshness, and drift management
• Strengthen high-availability, disaster-recovery, PITR, and backup approaches with sound design and validated procedures
• Reduce manual operational work by building automation and enabling safe, low-friction database workflows
• Improve observability and alert quality by championing meaningful metrics and reducing noise
• Enhance database security through access controls, patching, encryption, auditability, and secure operational patterns
• Contribute to modern platform initiatives including containerized environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, GitOps, reproducible deployments, and self-service database operations
• Partner with service, AI, and platform teams to improve performance patterns, operational readiness, data hygiene, and safe vector search use
• Participate in on-call rotations focused on predictability, instrumentation, and preventative engineering

Applicants may redact or remove information identifying age, date of birth, or educational attendance/graduation dates on their resumes. The company considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Kraken is an equal opportunity employer prohibiting discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics as outlined by law.