Principal Database Engineer (Crypto)

Location: Remote; available in the United Kingdom, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Ireland, Peru, Sweden, Colombia, Argentina, Romania, Cyprus, Switzerland, Portugal, Lithuania, South Africa, Czech Republic, Canada, Hungary, Mexico, Chile, Poland, Spain, and Bulgaria

Salary: $161K–$358.9K annually, plus equity and bonus opportunities

Company

hirify.global is a global crypto platform offering spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services. Payward builds financial infrastructure for an open global financial system.

What you will do

• Assess the production database estate for reliability, scale, cost, and operational complexity, then define target architecture, measurable goals, and a prioritised roadmap.
• Design and implement database migrations and scaling improvements with benchmarks, data-integrity checks, cutover plans, rollback plans, and production verification.
• Diagnose difficult MariaDB failures and performance limits across the database engine, storage, and application layers.
• Improve observability, backup, restore, disaster recovery, recovery objectives, and operational reliability through tested exercises and safer changes.
• Build production software for database provisioning, upgrades, failover, online schema changes, maintenance, and auditable self-service workflows.
• Collaborate with application teams on schemas, transactions, queries, data-store choices, and cross-team dependencies; mentor engineers and participate in on-call and incident response.

Requirements

• 8+ years operating and evolving production database estates at scale, including assessing inherited systems, setting technical direction, and delivering improvements with engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of high availability, replication, distributed database failure modes, consistency and availability trade-offs, transaction boundaries, reliable event delivery, and transactional outbox patterns.
• Deep, recent hands-on MariaDB expertise, including InnoDB, MVCC, transaction isolation, locking, query optimisation, binary logs, and MariaDB GTID replication.
• Personal ownership of MariaDB incident diagnosis, performance tuning, tested restore or point-in-time recovery, and data-integrity validation.
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, Go, Rust, or a comparable language, including production database automation with version control, code review, delivery pipelines, and tested failure handling.
• Strong low-level Linux, kernel, storage, and networking fundamentals, with the ability to investigate issues beyond the database process.
• Clear written technical judgment and demonstrated cross-team delivery without reporting-line authority, including developing experienced engineers through shared delivery.

Nice to have

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

Culture & Benefits

• Remote work across the listed countries and a globally distributed organisation.
• Individual-contributor role with influence across teams and several quarters of work.
• Equity and bonus opportunities in addition to base salary.
• Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis unless a specific deadline is stated.
• Qualified applicants with criminal histories are considered consistently with applicable fair-chance requirements.

Hiring process

• Job-related skills or work-style assessments may be included as part of the hiring process and are evaluated alongside experience and interviews.
• Applicants may redact age, date-of-birth, and educational attendance or graduation dates from resumes.