Mobile Design Engineer

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.

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. 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.

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.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the motion and interaction layer of the Kraken app (easing, springs, gestures, transitions, haptics, sound).
• Evolve the mobile design system, owning the components other engineers reach for (gesture handlers, transition primitives, animated containers, motion tokens).
• Partner closely with product designers, challenging and elevating motion and interaction design from concept through implementation.
• Profile and optimize 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 patterns that make doing the right thing easier.

What You Bring

• A portfolio: A demo reel, a personal site, a GitHub of interaction sketches, or screen captures of shipped work that demonstrate your craft.
• Deep React Native fluency: Strong experience with Reanimated, gesture handlers, and profiling JS thread vs. UI thread work.
• Taste in motion: Strong opinions about easing curves, spring damping, and transition feel.
• Product judgment: Ability to take a half-formed brief, find the actual problem, and ship an exceptional solution.
• AI tools integration: Experience using tools like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude to accelerate your workflow.
• Strong communication: Excellent written and verbal English, comfortable working in a globally distributed, async, and document-driven environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience with React Native Skia, shader work, or custom canvas-based rendering.
• Native mobile experience (Swift or Kotlin) sufficient to write a bridge module.
• Experience building a motion library or design-system contribution used by other engineers.
• A visual or motion design background (prototyping in Figma, After Effects, etc.).
• High-stakes product experience in fintech, trading, health, or other precision-critical fields.