Staff Engineer - Growth - Verifications

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. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services for both individual and institutional clients. The Pro Verifications team focuses on verifying business identities and compliance for onboarding business clients.

• Around eight years building and running production systems with domain technical ownership.
• Deep expertise in Rust, with ability to work in TypeScript and React for customer-facing verification.
• Experience setting architectures that eliminated recurring failures.
• Proven ability to improve team velocity through patterns, tooling, or mentoring.
• Experience in high-consequence domains such as compliance, payments, or security.
• Strong skills in distributed systems, service contracts, and secure design, integrating untrusted third-party APIs with timeouts, retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, and tested backup paths.
• Comfortable or able to quickly learn gRPC, Temporal, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, and GitLab CI.

• Set the shape of the verification services and their contracts across the KYC/KYB flow.
• Decide how to abstract KYC and KYB vendors to prevent outages from provider issues.
• Design fail-closed behavior and audit trails that comply with regulatory requirements.
• Identify and permanently remove recurring classes of failure.
• Write and drive architecture decisions (ADRs) ensuring security and compliance from design time.
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers through design reviews, code, and feedback.
• Be measured on improvements in verification speed, automation, correctness, system uptime, and team growth.

Applicants may redact personal identifying information related to age, date of birth, or educational dates from their resumes. Employment consideration includes attention to candidates with criminal histories in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. The employer is an equal opportunity employer prohibiting discrimination based on protected characteristics.