Mobile Design Engineer

BUILDING THE FUTURE OF OPEN FINANCE

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page https://www.kraken.com/culture to understand what drives us and how we work.

THE TEAM

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients.

The Consumer Mobile team builds the Kraken app, the interface millions of people use to interact with their money. We work in React Native and care deeply about how the product feels, not just whether it functions. A trade confirmation should feel instantaneous. A portfolio should feel alive. Navigation should feel effortless. These details directly impact trust, and trust is everything in crypto.

THE OPPORTUNITY

Most companies treat design and engineering as two practices that translate to each other. We're hiring someone who treats them as one craft. The translation step is where most products lose what makes them feel good.

You'll own the feel of the Kraken app: the half-second a trade confirms, the way a chart loads, how a sheet rises from the bottom of the screen and lands where it physically should. On a product where people move their savings, moments like that build trust.

This is a mobile-first role on a React Native codebase. We work in Reanimated and Skia, bridge to native when we need to, and sweat the split between the JS thread and the UI thread.

• Own the motion and interaction layer of the Kraken app. Easing, springs, gestures, transitions, haptics, sound. The perceptual surface from cold start to confirmation.

• Evolve the mobile design system. You'll own the components other engineers reach for (gesture handlers, transition primitives, animated containers, motion tokens) and the standards that govern them.

• Partner closely with product designers, challenging and elevating motion and interaction design from concept through implementation

• Profile and optimise rendering performance, especially on lower-end Android devices where frame drops are unforgivable

• Contribute to architectural decisions that affect UI responsiveness: state management, render cycles, and data flow into the view layer

• Raise the bar for what 'great' means across the mobile org by review, by example, and by writing the patterns that make doing the right thing easier than doing the wrong thing.

WHAT YOU BRING

• A portfolio. A demo reel, a personal site, a GitHub of interaction sketches, screen captures of work you've shipped that you're proud of. We don't care which format; we care that we can see your craft.

• Deep React Native fluency. You know Reanimated well enough to argue with people about it. You've fought gesture handlers. You've profiled JS thread vs. UI thread work and won. You can read a frame timeline and tell us where the time went.

• Taste in motion. You have opinions about easing curves. You notice when a spring is over-damped. You can articulate why a transition feels wrong before you know how to fix it.

• Product judgment. You can take a half-formed brief, find the actual problem inside it, and ship something better than what anyone thought to ask for. You shape what the spec should have been rather than wait for it to arrive.

• AI tools as part of how you work. Cursor, Copilot, Claude, whatever your stack is. You use them to move faster on the parts that aren't the craft so you can spend longer on the parts that are.

• Written and verbal English. We're globally distributed and live in docs and async threads.

NIC