Job description
Building the Future of Open Finance
Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.
Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work.
The team
Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.
We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our growing Consumer team. The Consumer team at Kraken focuses on building applications that expose Kraken's product offering to the mass market. Trying to onboard the next 100 million people to the benefits of crypto.
This role involves setting the technical direction for our "Consumer" applications — a suite of products aimed at offering the simplest way for our customers to interact with Kraken — and delivering the hardest parts of it yourself. We expect anyone applying for this role to have an extreme eye for detail, a passion for building genuinely world class user experiences, a "ship fast but don't ship shit" attitude, and the judgment to know which is which without being told.
The opportunity
Own the architecture and delivery of customer-facing Rust backend services powering trading, payments, and crypto experiences — making the design calls on systems that will outlive the feature you built them for
Take ambiguous, multi-quarter problems from "we think this matters" to shipped and measured, breaking them down so the rest of the team can move in parallel with you
Own features end-to-end rather than stopping at the API/backend boundary, and raise the bar on what "end-to-end" means for everyone around you — customer experience, frontend impact, and the product problem behind what you're building
Partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap for a product area, not just execute against it. You'll bring engineering insight that changes what gets built, and own the outcomes and metrics that follow
Drive initiatives that cross team boundaries — Kraken's trading infrastructure, platform, and other product teams — building the relationships and technical alignment needed to land them
Multiply the team: mentor mid-level engineers, review designs before code exists, unblock people quickly, and leave behind patterns and standards that make the next feature easier than the last
Use AI extensively to amplify scope and speed, moving from manually writing code toward orchestrating AI and validating implementation — and help the team do the same, defining what good AI-assisted engineering looks like here
What you bring
- 6+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep Rust proficiency across network services, asynchronous code, and distributed systems design (RPC protocols, Kafka, event-driven architectures)
- A track record of owning systems, not just features. You've made architectural decisions in production, lived with the consequences, and can explain the tradeoffs you'd make differently now
- Product engineering mindset. You've shipped features from problem → implementation → launch → user impact, with deep understanding of customer experience and product metrics, and you've influenced what got built and what got cut
- Demonstrated impact through others: mentoring, design review, technical writing, or setting standards that changed how a team worked
- Experience driving work that spans teams or orgs, where the hard part was alignment and sequencing as much as the code
- AI-first development approach where AI is already meaningfully incorporated into your workflow; you actively use AI for coding, understanding unfamiliar codebases, crossing technical boundaries, and validating implementations
- Ownership mindset with collaborative spirit. You personally drive features end-to-end, work across backend/frontend boundaries, and operate outside technical silos
- Openness to how the engineering profession is evolving because of AI, prioritizing shipping valuable products over manual code writing
Nice to haves
- Full-stack experience including React/TypeScript or other frontend frameworks — valuable for demonstrating cross-boundary collaboration mindset
- Cryptocurrency or blockchain domain knowledge
- Experience building and scaling products at consumer-focused technology companies, ideally at meaningful user scale
- Experience introducing AI tooling or workflows to an engineering team
Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.
Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
Our commitment
Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.
We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.
As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.
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