Senior Software Engineer - Rust - Consumer

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.

We are currently seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join our growing Consumer team. The Consumer team at Kraken focuses on building applications that expose Kraken's product offering to the mass market. Trying to onboard the next 100 million people to the benefits of crypto.

This role involves setting the technical direction for our "Consumer" applications — a suite of products aimed at offering the simplest way for our customers to interact with Kraken — and delivering the hardest parts of it yourself. We expect anyone applying for this role to have an extreme eye for detail, a passion for building genuinely world class user experiences, a "ship fast but don't ship shit" attitude, and the judgment to know which is which without being told.

The opportunity

• Own the architecture and delivery of customer-facing Rust backend services powering trading, payments, and crypto experiences — making the design calls on systems that will outlive the feature you built them for

• Take ambiguous, multi-quarter problems from "we think this matters" to shipped and measured, breaking them down so the rest of the team can move in parallel with you

• Own features end-to-end rather than stopping at the API/backend boundary, and raise the bar on what "end-to-end" means for everyone around you — customer experience, frontend impact, and the product problem behind what you're building

• Partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap for a product area, not just execute against it. You'll bring engineering insight that changes what gets built, and own the outcomes and metrics that follow

• Drive initiatives that cross team boundaries — Kraken's trading infrastructure, platform, and other product teams — building the relationships and technical alignment needed to land them

• Multiply the team: mentor mid-level engineers, review designs before code exists, unblock people quickly, and leave behind patterns and standards that make the next feature easier than the last

• Use AI extensively to amplify scope and speed, moving from manually writing code toward orchestrating AI and validating implementation — and help the team do the same, defining what good AI-assisted engineering looks like here

What you bring

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep Rust proficiency across network services, asynchronous code, and distributed systems design (RPC protocols, Kafka, event-driven architectures)

• A track record of owning systems, not just features. You've made architectural decisions in production, lived with the consequences, and can explain the tradeoffs you'd make differently now

• Product engineering mindset. You've shipped features from problem → implementation → launch → user impact, with deep understanding of customer experience and product metrics, and you've influenced what got built and what got cut

• Demonstrated impact through others: mentoring, design review, technical writing, or setting standards that changed how a team worked

• Experience driving work that spans teams or orgs, where the hard part was alignment and sequencing as much as the code

• AI-first development approach where AI is already meanin