Staff Software Engineer - Rust Backend - Consumer Trading

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.

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.

Consumer Trading builds the services behind the trading experiences people use across Kraken’s consumer products. Product, mobile, web, and partner engineering teams build on those services. The work is keeping them reliable, clear, and safe for several teams to change at once.

The opportunity

You’ll be a hands-on backend engineer working in Rust on customer-facing systems where correctness, speed, and trust matter.

• Partner with Product and Design to understand the client journey, challenge assumptions, and choose a scope that solves the underlying problem.
• Set technical direction for the Consumer Trading backend: service boundaries, contracts, and shared patterns that let several teams deliver safely and independently.
• Lead complex work from discovery through rollout. Make tradeoffs clear, measure what changed for clients and the system, and adjust when the result falls short.
• Remove recurring causes of incorrect or unreliable behavior. Improve testing, observability, and recovery in the parts of the trading journey where mistakes matter most.
• Write code where your judgment has the most value. Develop senior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and direct feedback; leave behind decisions and patterns they can apply without depending on you.

What you bring

• Deep Rust expertise building and operating production backend services, including asynchronous and distributed systems.
• Sound judgment about API contracts, asynchronous workflows, data correctness, testing, observability, and recovery, on systems that have to stay financially correct.
• Product judgment you can demonstrate: you helped define a client problem, shaped what was built, and learned from its effect after launch.
• A record of technical direction that held up in production across teams or services, including the tradeoffs you made and what you would change now.
• Evidence that your work made other engineers more effective and helped teams align and deliver without formal authority.

Nice to haves

• Experience with trading, payments, or other financially consequential systems.
• Experience with real-time data or products spanning mobile and web.
• Experience helping a team use AI tools effectively while retaining clear ownership of engineering decisions and quality.
• TypeScript or React experience that helps you work across the client and API boundary.

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Our commitment

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

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