Senior Remote Database Administrator Engineer

MariaDB is making a big impact on the world. Whether you're checking your bank account, buying a coffee, shopping online, making a phone call, listening to music, taking out a loan or ordering takeout, MariaDB is the backbone of applications used every day. Companies small and large, including 75% of the Fortune 500, run MariaDB, touching the lives of billions of people. With massive reach through Linux distributions, enterprise deployments and public clouds, MariaDB is uniquely positioned as the leading database for modern application development.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Senior Remote DBA who already operates at an expert level and wants to own the hardest problems our customers bring us. You will be a senior member of our global Remote DBA team. You'll be responsible for the health, performance and resilience of business-critical MariaDB environments for customers around the world, both on their own infrastructure and on MariaDB Cloud.

This is not a learning role. Customers and colleagues will rely on your judgment when a production cluster is down, a migration goes sideways, or an architecture needs to be rethought. You will work autonomously, make technical decisions, and explain them clearly to customer engineering teams.
We are a "virtual" team, distributed globally and working over the internet. We make heavy use of email, Slack, the web, ssh and similar remote technologies. Because we provide coverage to our customers 24x7x365, this position involves on-call duty and occasional work on nights, weekends and holidays. We use our global team to minimize the impact as much as possible.

What You Will Do

• Own the operational health of complex customer MariaDB environments: replication topologies, Galera clusters, MaxScale deployments and large datasets.
• Act as a senior escalation point for critical incidents, including after-hours, and drive them through to resolution and root cause analysis.
• Perform deep performance analysis and tuning: query and schema optimization, InnoDB and server configuration, concurrency and locking issues.
• Design, review and implement high availability and disaster recovery architectures, and validate them through tested failover and recovery.
• Define and verify backup and recovery strategies, and lead recoveries when they are needed.
• Plan and execute major version upgrades and migrations with minimal customer downtime.
• Perform capacity planning and proactive health checks, and turn findings into clear, prioritized recommendations.
• Automate repetitive work, and help build the tooling, runbooks and standards that the whole Remote DBA team uses.
• Communicate directly with customers: technical calls, incident updates, written reports and RCAs.
• Share knowledge with and support less experienced team members. You should be able to guide others, even though this role has no formal management responsibility.
• Participate in the community through blog posts, talks or contributions to the MariaDB ecosystem.

What You Bring

• 8+ years of hands-on DBA experience with MariaDB and/or MySQL in production environments.
• Deep knowledge of MariaDB/MySQL internals, InnoDB, query optimization and server tuning.
• Strong, hands-on experience with replication (asynchronous, semi-synchronous, GTID) and Galera Cluster.
• Experience designing and operating MariaDB MaxScale (read/write splitting, failover, routing).
• Proficiency with backup and recovery tools such as MariaDB Backup, mydumper and mysqldump, including point-in-time recovery.
• Solid Linux system administration skills, covering storage, networking and OS-level performance troubleshooting.
• Proficiency in at least one scripting language (Bash, Python, Go or similar) for automation.
• Proven ability to troubleshoot complex production incidents under pressure and lead them to resolution.
• Excellent written and spoken English. You will be talking directly with customer engineers and explaining complex issues clearly.
• Comfortable working remotely and autonomously, with tenacity in customer follow-up.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Kubernetes and containers, including running stateful databases on Kubernetes.
• Experience with MariaDB ColumnStore or other columnar databases.
• Experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and managed database services.
• Experience with MariaDB/MySQL monitoring tools (e.g. Prometheus, PMM).
• Experience in a 24x7 support or Remote DBA environment.
• Contributions to open source software in the MariaDB/MySQL ecosystem.
• MariaDB and/or MySQL certifications.
• Experience in pre-sales or architecture reviews with customers.

Location

Remote – Bulgaria (or hybrid from our Sofia office).

• The preferred shift rota is Tuesday–Saturday or Sunday–Thursday.
• Other flexible schedules with weekend coverage are desirable.

Travel

Flexible to travel internationally for company-related meetings.

Compensation Salary Range: 70,000 - 94,000 EUR per year (gross)

Please note: The starting salary offered will be commensurate with the candidate's skills, qualifications, and relevant experience, in alignment with our gender-neutral compensation framework.

What's in it for you?

Impact the world of technology by pushing the boundaries of technology and business models, working at MariaDB, plc. Be part of a game-changing organization that encourages outside-the-box thinking, values empowerment, and is truly shaping the future of the software industry. You'll be collaborating with high-caliber colleagues around the world, offering unparalleled learning and growth opportunities. We provide a very competitive compensation package, 25 days paid annual leave (plus holidays) and a massive degree of flexibility and freedom, and more.

How to Apply

If you are interested in this position, please submit your application along with your CV/Resume through our ATS Greenhouse on our MariaDB Careers site.

• At MariaDB we celebrate the diverse experiences and perspectives of our employees because this drives innovation and success. MariaDB is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to creating a welcoming and inclusive workplace for everyone.
• MariaDB does not sponsor work visas or relocation.
• MariaDB is committed to providing accommodations for individuals with disabilities within our application and interview process. To request an accommodation due to a disability, please inform your recruiter.
• MariaDB will not accept agency resumes without a prior contractual agreement with HR. Please do not forward resumes to any recruiting alias or employee directly. MariaDB is not responsible for paying any fees associated with any unsolicited submitted CV/Resumes.

MariaDB is an equal opportunities employer.