Senior Database Administrator

📋 Description

• • Design, develop, and maintain high-quality PostgreSQL database systems supporting Kraken’s global expansion and critical crypto services, ensuring performance, reliability, and scalability under high-volume transaction loads.
• • Own PostgreSQL operational fundamentals including WAL behavior, checkpoints, autovacuum, query planning, locking mechanisms, replication lag, backup/restore procedures, and capacity planning across production environments.
• • Build and operate vector data platforms using pgvector and other dedicated VectorDB systems, defining production patterns for embeddings, approximate nearest neighbor indexes, metadata filtering, recall/latency tradeoffs, reindexing, and data drift management.
• • Strengthen high-availability and disaster-recovery frameworks through PITR, automated failover, replication slots, and regularly validated recovery procedures to ensure uptime for mission-critical trading and user-facing services.
• • Reduce manual operational toil by automating routine tasks, standardizing workflows, and enabling self-service database operations through infrastructure-as-code and GitOps practices.
• • Improve observability for PostgreSQL and vector workloads by championing meaningful metrics, reducing alert noise, creating dashboards, and ensuring query-level visibility for proactive incident response.
• • Enhance database security through strict access controls, disciplined patching and upgrade cycles, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logging, and secure operational patterns aligned with Kraken’s industry-leading security standards.
• • Contribute to modern platform initiatives including containerized environments, Kubernetes orchestration, Terraform-based infrastructure provisioning, and reproducible deployments using CI/CD pipelines.
• • Partner with AI, platform, and engineering teams to establish safe and efficient patterns for vector search usage, data hygiene, and performance optimization across embedding-dependent systems such as recommendation, fraud detection, and retrieval-augmented AI.
• • Participate in on-call rotations with a focus on making incidents predictable, well-instrumented, and mitigated through preventative engineering and automated remediation.
• • Document operational procedures, system architectures, and runbooks to ensure knowledge sharing and operational continuity across global engineering teams.
• • Advocate for reliability engineering practices including SLOs, error budgets, and operational reviews to embed resilience into database and vector platform design.
• • Drive continuous improvement in database performance through query optimization, index strategy refinement, partitioning, and statistics management across diverse workloads.
• • Collaborate with SREs and platform engineers to align database operations with broader infrastructure goals, ensuring seamless integration with cloud, storage, and networking systems.
• • Support the adoption of containerized PostgreSQL deployments and manage Kubernetes workloads at scale with attention to resource allocation, storage persistence, and network policies.
• • Ensure compliance with security and audit requirements through rigorous credential lifecycle management, role-based access control, and audit trail integrity across all database systems.
• • Maintain deep expertise in PostgreSQL internals including MVCC, transaction isolation levels, bloat management, and query planner behavior to diagnose and resolve complex performance issues.
• • Stay current with emerging trends in vector search, AI/ML data pipelines, and scalable database architectures to inform Kraken’s technical roadmap for future product initiatives.