Senior Software Engineer - Rust - Core Services

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.

Our Platform and Core Engineering teams build the systems that make Kraken secure, resilient, and scalable. Their impact isn’t measured by customer-facing features, but by the strength, correctness, and leverage of the foundations they create. These teams power Kraken systems behind the scenes — enabling product teams to move fast while meeting the highest standards for reliability, compliance, and security.

Engineers design shared services, internal platforms, and critical infrastructure that support company-wide initiatives. They optimize for safety, scalability, observability, auditability, and operational excellence — often operating in regulated, security-sensitive, and risk-heavy environments where precision matters.

We’re looking for engineers with deep systems ownership and an architecture-first mindset — builders who take pride in long-lived services, thrive in complex environments, and are motivated by strengthening the backbone of the crypto ecosystem.

The opportunity

• Design and implement robust Rust services and foundational libraries that power Kraken’s core infrastructure, prioritizing correctness, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Write reusable, testable, and highly efficient code built for scale, observability, and operational resilience in production environments.
• Collaborate on large-scale distributed systems architecture, shaping low-latency, fault-tolerant services that support global trading and internal platforms.
• Work alongside hundreds of experienced Rust engineers, contributing to a high-bar engineering culture grounded in ownership, rigor, and craftsmanship.

What you bring

• 7+ years of software engineering experience
• Experience building and scaling shared systems, internal platforms, and supporting multiple product roadmaps
• Proficient in writing network services or asynchronous code in Rust
• Have a security-first mindset during system design to ensure robustness
• Demonstrate the ability to autonomously debug issues across the stack (OS, network, application)
• Apply a solid understanding of distributed systems and technologies, including RPC protocols, Kafka, and Event-Driven Systems, to design scalable solutions
• Collaborate effectively with product teams to gather requirements and constraints for designing appropriate systemsTake complete end-to-end ownership of systems and libraries

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Our commitment

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.