Senior Data Engineer - Agents Systems

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks. Kraken, founded in 2011, is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally. The Agent Systems team is a 0→1 engineering group building internal AI-powered agents that interact directly with company systems to increase internal speed of execution through automation, intelligent inference, and workflow orchestration.

• 5+ years in data engineering with at least 2 years focused on streaming systems in production
• Hands-on experience with RisingWave, Apache Flink, Kafka Streams, or comparable stream processing frameworks
• Strong understanding of feature store design including online/offline consistency, point-in-time correctness, and low-latency serving
• Experience building data pipelines that feed production ML models or inference systems
• Proficiency in Python and/or Scala; SQL fluency required
• Familiarity with data quality frameworks, pipeline observability, and SLA ownership
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment embedded within an AI-focused team

Nice to haves:

• Direct experience with RisingWave in production
• Exposure to inference pipeline architecture or model serving infrastructure
• Experience with feature platforms
• Crypto or fintech domain experience

• Own and evolve streaming data pipelines that power live inference and real-time model serving across Kraken's AI infrastructure
• Design and build feature stores that serve low-latency, high-reliability features to production ML models
• Implement and maintain streaming systems using RisingWave, Apache Flink, or Kafka Streams, selecting the right tool for the workload
• Partner with ML engineers and AI infrastructure teams to define data contracts, feature schemas, and pipeline SLAs
• Drive pipelines toward real-time where batch exists today, reducing latency from hours to seconds
• Ensure data quality, observability, and auditability across all streaming and feature engineering systems
• Contribute to inference pipeline tooling where data engineering and model serving intersect
• Evaluate emerging streaming and feature store technologies and shape the team's technical roadmap

Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis unless a specific deadline is stated. Applicants may redact or remove information identifying age, date of birth, or educational attendance/graduation dates. The company 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 law.