Data Platform Engineering Manager

Kraken is a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values, aiming to accelerate the global adoption of crypto for financial freedom and inclusion. The Data Platform team builds real-time infrastructure powering decision-making across one of the world's largest digital asset exchanges, processing billions of events daily across trading, compliance, and product systems.

• 8+ years in data engineering, platform engineering, or distributed systems with at least 3 years managing engineering teams
• Experience building data-lakes in AWS (Spark, Athena, Iceberg, Parquet, Presto), including data modeling, data quality best practices, and self-service tooling
• Strong expertise in building and operating real-time data at scale including Kafka, Spark Streaming, Debezium, and CDC pipelines
• Proven ability to manage competing priorities across multiple stakeholder groups
• Strong communication skills for technical and non-specialist audiences
• Experience designing or adopting AI/ML-powered automation in data workflows including pipeline orchestration, intelligent monitoring, automated remediation, or LLM-integrated tooling
• Proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java in a production data platform context
• Solid understanding of cloud-native data infrastructure (AWS Glue, Athena, S3, EMR, Lambda, or equivalents)
• Track record of managing, recruiting, and developing high-performing remote engineering teams
• Ability to translate long-term platform vision into executable quarterly roadmaps
• Servant-leadership style coaching and growing engineers

Nice to have:

• Experience with RisingWave and/or Clickhouse in production or evaluation
• Familiarity with LLM-based agents or AI workflow frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, custom orchestration)
• Background in cryptocurrency, trading systems, or high-throughput financial data
• Experience building self-service data platform tooling for internal engineering consumers
• Contributions to open-source streaming or data infrastructure projects

• Lead and grow a team of senior data platform engineers building Kraken's real-time streaming infrastructure
• Own the architecture and roadmap for high-volume low-frequency data systems, focusing on data stack like Spark, Kafka, Iceberg, RisingWave, Apache Flink
• Design and operate scalable data architecture serving trading, risk, compliance, analytics, and product teams
• Drive adoption of AI automation and intelligent workflows including data quality checks, pipeline orchestration, anomaly detection, and self-healing infrastructure
• Partner with ML/AI, analytics, and product engineering teams to deliver platform capabilities
• Evolve Kraken's data-lake and warehouse architecture to support batch and streaming workloads
• Set technical direction balancing reliability, velocity, and cost efficiency at scale
• Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier platform engineers; build a culture of ownership and technical excellence

Applicants may redact or remove information identifying age, date of birth, or educational attendance/graduation dates on their resumes. Kraken considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Kraken is an equal opportunity employer and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.