Senior Database Administrator - Core Infrastructure

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks. It builds a modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platform to advance an open, global financial system.

• 5+ years operating MariaDB/MySQL in high-volume production environments including tuning, replication, and troubleshooting.
• Strong understanding of high-availability patterns, distributed database behavior, and practical failure scenarios.
• Hands-on experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers such as HAProxy, ProxySQL, or MaxScale.
• Practical experience with CI/CD, GitOps, and Infrastructure-as-Code workflows; Terraform experience is ideal.
• Solid cloud, Linux, 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, upgrade processes, and safe operational workflows.
• Expertise in observability including monitoring, alerting hygiene, and readiness for incident response.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including partnership with stakeholders, negotiation of long-term plans, formal documentation, and metrics/KPIs tying.

• Scale and tune high-throughput MariaDB clusters to support global expansion and new product initiatives.
• Strengthen high-availability, disaster-recovery, and backup approaches through sound design and regularly validated procedures.
• Reduce manual operational work by building automation, improving process consistency, and enabling safe, low-friction database workflows.
• Improve observability and alert quality by championing meaningful metrics, reducing noise, and ensuring operational clarity across environments.
• Enhance database security through robust access controls, disciplined patching and upgrade practices, and secure operational patterns.
• Contribute to modern platform initiatives, including containerized environments, infrastructure-as-code workflows, and reproducible deployments.
• Partner with service teams to drive better performance patterns, operational readiness, and database hygiene across the engineering organization.
• Participate in on-call rotations focusing on predictable, data-informed, and preventative engineering.

Applicants may remove personal identifying information from resumes. The employer considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Equal opportunity employer with non-discrimination policies.