Senior Software Engineer - Rust - Consumer

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks, building a modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platform to advance an open, global financial system. Kraken is a crypto platform founded in 2011, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions globally, offering spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services for individual investors and institutional clients.

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with deep Rust proficiency in network services, asynchronous code, and distributed systems design (RPC protocols, Kafka, event-driven architectures)
• Proven track record of owning systems and making architectural decisions in production
• Product engineering mindset: shipped features end-to-end with understanding of customer experience and product metrics
• Demonstrated impact through mentoring, design review, technical writing, or setting team standards
• Experience driving work that spans multiple teams or organizations, focusing on alignment and sequencing
• AI-first development approach, actively using AI for coding, understanding unfamiliar codebases, crossing technical boundaries, and validating implementations
• Ownership mindset with collaborative spirit, working end-to-end and across backend/frontend boundaries
• Openness to evolving engineering practices driven by AI, prioritizing shipping valuable products over manual coding

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 significant 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
• Break down ambiguous, multi-quarter problems to enable parallel team work
• Own features end-to-end including customer experience and frontend impact
• Partner with product leadership to shape product roadmaps and own outcomes and metrics
• Drive cross-team initiatives and build technical alignment across teams
• Mentor mid-level engineers, review designs before implementation, unblock team members, and establish patterns and standards
• Use AI extensively to amplify development speed and workflow, and help define AI-assisted engineering practices

Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis unless a deadline is stated. Applicants may redact or remove personal identifying information related to age, date of birth, or educational attendance dates on their resumes. The employer considers qualified applicants with criminal histories following the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Kraken is an equal opportunity employer prohibiting discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics per federal, state, or local laws.