About the role
<p><strong>About MariaDB</strong></p> <p>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 everyday. 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.</p> <p>We’re looking for a <strong>Principal Software Engineer (Distributed)</strong> who’s excited about solving hard problems in distributed systems and enjoys turning complex challenges into elegant, reliable solutions.</p> <p><strong>The Role</strong><br>You’ll join a small, highly skilled team where your work will have a direct impact. Expect to dig deep into replication, sharding, concurrency, and performance optimization—making our systems faster, smarter, and more resilient. You’ll collaborate globally, contribute to open source, and push the limits of what a distributed database can do.</p> <p><strong>What You’ll Do</strong></p> <ul> <li>Build and test distributed database solutions that scale.</li> <li>Make systems rock-solid in performance and reliability, across both on-prem and cloud.</li> <li>Work on replication, sharding, and consistency models (Raft, MVCC, ACID).</li> <li>Profile, debug, and fine-tune performance with tools like perf, htop, iostat—and your own tricks.</li> <li>Keep code clean and reviewable with Git.</li> <li>Shape infrastructure using CMake or Bazel.</li> <li>Configure and monitor with YAML/JSONnet, Prometheus, and Grafana.</li> <li>Dive into Linux/Unix internals (systemd, cgroups, logging, core dumps).</li> <li>Automate testing and performance validation with load-testing scripts (YandexTank or your own).</li> </ul> <p><strong>What You Bring</strong></p> <ul> <li> <div>5+ years of professional experience in C++ (Python/Bash scripting a plus).</div> </li> <li> <div>Working knowledge of SQL (MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL).&nbsp;</div> </li> <li> <div>Familiarity with distributed systems concepts (concurrency, multithreading, ACID).</div> </li> <li> <div>Comfort with Linux/Unix systems. (systemd, cgroups, logging, etc), and debugging tools.</div> </li> <li> <div>Understanding of performance profiling approaches.</div> </li> <li> <div>Bonus: Raft/MVCC experience, open-source contributions, Prometheus/Grafana, performance/load testing.</div&g