Staff Engineer - Growth - Verifications

The Opportunity

As a Staff Engineer on the Pro Verifications team, you will own the technical direction for Kraken's verification infrastructure. You will be hands-on across the stack, designing architecture that remains fast, safe, and defensible as the platform scales.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Set the shape of verification services and contracts across the KYC/KYB flow.
• Architecture: Decide how to abstract KYC/KYB vendors to ensure system resilience and prevent outages.
• System Design: Design fail-closed behavior and audit trails that satisfy strict regulatory scrutiny.
• Reliability: Identify and eliminate recurring classes of failure rather than patching individual incidents.
• Mentorship: Raise the bar for senior engineers through design reviews, code contributions, and direct feedback.
• Standards: Drive architecture decisions (ADRs) and enforce security and compliance at the design phase.

What You Bring

• Experience: ~8 years building and running production systems with a track record of owning technical direction.
• Technical Fluency: Deep expertise in Rust, with versatility in TypeScript and React.
• Distributed Systems: Strong background in service contracts, secure design, and integrating third-party APIs (timeouts, retries, idempotency, circuit breakers).
• High-Stakes Engineering: Experience building systems where errors have significant consequences (compliance, payments, security).
• Tooling: Familiarity with or ability to quickly ramp on gRPC, Temporal, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, and GitLab CI.

Nice to Haves

• Direct experience with KYC, KYB, or fraud work (e.g., Trulioo, Persona, ComplyAdvantage).
• Experience building with AI-in-the-loop systems.
• Background in crypto, fintech, or highly regulated industries.