What you'll be doing

• Review the database estate considering business needs and production evidence, judging reliability, scale, cost, and operational complexity.
• Define target architecture and measurable goals, and agree on a prioritized roadmap with engineering leads and teams.
• Execute the roadmap through design, implementation, and adoption, handling migrations and scaling with benchmarks and recovery plans.
• Investigate MariaDB failures and performance limits; improve reliability with observability, safer changes, and tested disaster recovery procedures.
• Build and maintain production software for database provisioning, upgrades, and routine maintenance incorporating security controls.
• Collaborate with application teams on schema design, transaction boundaries, and data-store choices, clarifying operational consequences.
• Mentor engineers via design reviews, pairing, and incident analysis to build database expertise and ownership of technical decisions.
• Participate in on-call and incident response, ensuring operational ownership and learning from production incidents.

Requirements

• 8+ years experience operating and evolving production database estates at scale, including assessing and setting technical direction.
• Strong understanding of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, and consistency versus availability trade-offs.
• Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise including InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, query optimisation, binary logs, and GTID replication.
• Personal ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning, and tested restore or point-in-time recovery procedures.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or similar languages with experience in production automation and workflows for databases.
• Solid low-level Linux, kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals to investigate issues beyond the database process.
• Clear written technical judgment and proven ability to deliver cross-team results without direct authority.

Nice to haves

• Experience operating databases in containerized, hybrid on-premises/cloud, or multi-region environments including Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.
• Experience with database proxies or load-balancing layers such as MaxScale, HAProxy, or ProxySQL.
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, Vitess, TiDB, ScyllaDB, ClickHouse, or internal database platforms, and operational knowledge of Kafka, Redis/Valkey, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Experience in regulated environments or contributions to database engines, operators, or infrastructure software.