Engineering Manager - Frontend - Consumer

Payward — the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks — builds financial infrastructure platforms to advance an open, global financial system.

The Team

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 for individual investors and institutional clients.

We’re looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a cross-functional Consumer pod focused on building and scaling core Krak experiences. This leader will guide a team of Frontend (React / React Native) and Backend (Rust) engineers to deliver seamless, performant user experiences across Kraken’s primary consumer surfaces.

You’ll work closely with Product, Design, and other Engineering Managers to ensure Krak delivers exceptional UX, technical quality, and operational reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-functional team of frontend and backend engineers responsible for core Krak consumer experiences.
• Own the end-to-end UX for key Krak features across mobile and client platforms.
• Guide the delivery of high-quality consumer applications, focusing on usability, performance, and scale.
• Partner with Product Managers and Designers to define and deliver high-impact features with measurable business and customer value.
• Collaborate with other Engineering Managers and Tech Leads to maintain consistent engineering standards across services and client platforms.
• Champion engineering excellence, maintainable architectures, and code quality.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical growth, collaboration, and inclusivity.
• Strengthen team organization and delivery using agile processes, project tracking, and engineering metrics (e.g., DORA, cycle time).

Requirements

• Proven experience leading engineering teams delivering customer-facing products at scale.
• Experience managing combined frontend and backend engineering teams.
• Deep technical background in React Native with a solid understanding of modern frontend architectures.
• Strong cross-functional leadership, able to align frontend and backend efforts in a complex, multi-platform environment.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Empathy for the customer and a passion for building intuitive, performant consumer experiences.
• Experience building large-scale consumer or financial products.

Nice to Have

• Background in systems design or distributed architectures.
• Working knowledge of Rust (or similar languages such as Go or C++), and familiarity with async architectures, APIs, and microservices.
• Experience in the payments and card domains.