Software Engineer - Rust - Consumer

About Kraken & Payward

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.

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.

The Team

We are currently seeking an experienced 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, aiming to onboard the next 100 million people to crypto.

This role primarily involves developing features and maintaining our Consumer applications — a suite of applications aimed at offering the simplest way for customers to interact with Kraken. We expect candidates to have an extreme eye for detail, a passion for building world-class user experiences, a "ship fast but don't ship shit" attitude, and to be highly self-driven.

The Opportunity

• Design and implement customer-facing Rust backend services powering trading, payments, and crypto experiences.
• Own features end-to-end rather than stopping at the API/backend boundary, understanding customer experience, frontend impact, and the underlying product problems.
• Collaborate with product teams to understand customer requirements and integrate with Kraken's trading infrastructure while maintaining a product-led engineering focus.
• Propose improvements and drive solutions autonomously by translating evolving product requirements into resilient solutions that ship valuable experiences.
• Use AI extensively to amplify scope and speed, moving from manually writing code toward orchestrating AI and validating implementations.

Requirements

• Strong background as a Rust/backend engineer with proficiency in network services, asynchronous code, and distributed systems design (RPC protocols, Kafka, event-driven architectures).
• Product engineering mindset with experience shipping features from problem definition through implementation, launch, and user impact measurement.
• AI-first development approach, actively incorporating AI into your workflow for coding, understanding unfamiliar codebases, and validating implementations.
• Ownership mindset with a collaborative spirit, driving features across backend/frontend boundaries without operating in technical silos.
• Security-first approach to system design with the ability to autonomously debug across the stack (OS, network, application).
• Openness to how AI is evolving the engineering profession, prioritizing valuable product outcomes over manual code writing.

Nice to Haves

• Full-stack experience including React/TypeScript or other frontend frameworks.
• Cryptocurrency or blockchain domain knowledge.
• Experience building products at consumer-focused technology companies.