Senior Software Engineer - Rust - Consumer

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks. Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally, offering spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services to both individual investors and institutional clients.

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with deep Rust proficiency in network services, asynchronous code, and distributed systems design (including RPC protocols, Kafka, event-driven architectures).
• Proven track record of owning systems through architectural decisions in production.
• Product engineering mindset with experience shipping features end-to-end and understanding user impact and product metrics.
• Demonstrated impact through mentoring, design review, technical writing, or setting team standards.
• Experience driving work that spans multiple teams or organizations.
• AI-first development approach, actively using AI for coding, understanding codebases, and validating implementations.
• Ownership mindset with collaboration across backend and frontend boundaries.
• Openness to evolving engineering practices influenced by AI.

Nice to have:

• Full-stack experience including React/TypeScript or other frontend frameworks.
• Cryptocurrency or blockchain domain knowledge.
• Experience building and scaling consumer-focused technology products at meaningful user scale.
• Experience introducing AI tooling or workflows to an engineering team.

• Own the architecture and delivery of customer-facing Rust backend services powering trading, payments, and crypto experiences.
• Take ambiguous, multi-quarter problems from initial concept to shipped and measured solutions.
• Own features end-to-end including customer experience, frontend impact, and underlying product problems.
• Partner with product leadership to shape product roadmaps and own outcomes and metrics.
• Drive initiatives that cross team boundaries, building relationships and technical alignment.
• Mentor mid-level engineers, review designs before coding, unblock team members, and establish patterns and standards.
• Use AI extensively to amplify scope and speed, orchestrate AI-assisted engineering, and help define best practices.

Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis. Applicants may redact or remove information identifying age, date of birth, or education dates on their resumes. Kraken considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Equal opportunity employer without discrimination based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or other protected characteristics under applicable laws.