Head of Financial Systems Engineering - Kraken

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.

Kraken is on a mission to build the most trusted bridge between crypto and traditional finance. The Financial Systems Engineering team connects activity across products, payments, banking, and digital assets to the data, ledgers, controls, and applications Finance relies on. Our engineers bring expertise in data engineering, complex transaction flows, financial systems, and reconciliation. We partner with Treasury, Accounting, Tax, FP&A, Product, Risk, Security, Compliance, and platform engineering to make financial data reliable, explainable, and auditable.

The Opportunity

• Report to the CFO and lead the engineering vision for Kraken’s financial systems, translating Finance priorities into a clear technical strategy and delivery roadmap.
• Assess the current landscape, including fragmented data, processes, and technical debt. Define a target architecture and phased transformation plan based on evidence, business needs, and sound engineering judgment.
• Lead, coach, and grow a team of specialists across financial systems, data engineering, integrations, and ledger-related services. Establish clear ownership and develop technical leaders.
• Set standards for the completeness, quality, lineage, and ownership of financial data, from source events through transaction and balance records, reconciliation, accounting, and reporting.
• Contribute to architecture decisions for ledgers, subledgers, financial data models, APIs, and integrations across fiat and crypto activity. Determine what should be standardized and where distinct product flows need governed treatment.
• Partner with Accounting and Treasury to improve account and legal entity attribution, financial controls, reconciliation, exception handling, and the traceability of records across internal and external systems.
• Lead modernization and migration without disrupting close, reporting, fund movements, or other critical Finance operations. Define validation checkpoints and criteria for retiring legacy processes and systems.
• Establish end-to-end testing, documentation, observability, release controls, and incident response practices that account for the financial impact of upstream changes.
• Partner with Product, platform engineering, Risk, Security, Compliance, Tax, and Legal on system boundaries, access controls, resilience, regulatory needs, and auditability.
• Evaluate build, buy, and integration options; review consequential designs; and communicate architectural decisions, sequencing, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to Finance and Engineering leaders.

What You Will Tackle First

In your first year, you’ll build the foundations for a more reliable, scalable Finance architecture:

• Move key reconciliations from a monthly to a daily cadence, with clear ownership and a process for resolving exceptions.
• Reduce the time needed to find the root cause of reconciliation breaks from weeks to days.
• Map and validate the source tables and transformations that actually feed financial statements, establishing lineage and ownership.
• Complete the UAT data lake connections needed to test financial data flows end to end before changes reach production.

What You Bring

• Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience, including leading experienced teams through complex financial systems or data architecture change.
• A strong track record of hiring, coaching, and developing specialists while creating clear ownership, high engineering standards, and effective cross-functional partnerships.
• Deep understanding of ledgers, subledgers, double-entry concepts, reconciliation, settlement, and the path from an operational event to an auditable financial record.
• Experience with crypto or digital asset infrastructure and the challenges of connecting on-chain activity, internal balances, custody or wallet flows, and traditional financial systems.
• Strong technical judgment in distributed systems, data engineering, APIs, event-driven processing, and integrations across complex platforms.
• Experience defining a target architecture and delivering a transformation roadmap across fragmented or legacy systems while sustaining production reliability.
• Experience designing for data completeness, accuracy, lineage, reconciliation, access control, and auditability.
• Sound judgment in production operations, including incident response, monitoring, debugging, change management, and reliability improvements.
• Ability to partner with senior Finance and Engineering leaders and translate financial, operational, and control needs into a practical engineering roadmap.
• Ability to lead experts and make informed architecture decisions without needing to be the deepest specialist in every domain; clear communication of priorities and tradeoffs to executives and technical teams.
• Experience with Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, or Python; finance applications such as NetSuite, Kyriba, or BlackLine; and SOX or SOC control environments is valuable.