Our Krakenites are a world-class team with crypto conviction, united by our desire to discover and unlock the potential of crypto and blockchain technology.
What makes us different?
Kraken is a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values. As a Krakenite, you’ll join us on our mission to accelerate the global adoption of crypto, so that everyone can achieve financial freedom and inclusion. For over a decade, Kraken’s focus on our mission and crypto ethos has attracted many of the most talented crypto experts in the world.
As a fully remote company, we have Krakenites in 70+ countries who speak over 50 languages. Krakenites are industry pioneers who develop premium crypto products for experienced traders, institutions, and newcomers to the space.
Proof of workThe team
In this team, you’ll help expand the Kraken platform by building new backend capabilities and shared primitives that unlock new product experiences. You’ll work in a high-trust, fast-moving environment where projects are often early-stage and ambiguous, including work that’s AI-adjacent and deeply technical, with an emphasis on systems-level thinking and engineering excellence.
You’ll collaborate with senior leadership and cross-functional partners to design and deliver new backend capabilities that interface directly with core platform infrastructure. The team values engineers who care deeply about how things work under the hood while remaining pragmatic and outcome-oriented.
The ideal candidate
You have high engineering horsepower and strong fundamentals (systems thinking, debugging, architecture, performance), while staying practical and outcome-oriented.
You do what must be done to move the work forward—and you leave things better than you found them: improving coding standards, tests, local dev experience, observability, and dependency health, not just shipping the happy-path feature.
You hold a clear effort/reward lens: you invest where it compounds, avoid perfectionism for its own sake, and consistently prioritize the outcomes that matter.
You’re low-ego, high-standards: you raise the quality bar through example, thoughtful reviews, and good taste—without creating friction.
You communicate clearly, bring calm energy, and help teams stay optimistic and focused when timelines are real and constraints are sharp.
You’ve likely been a tech lead or engineering manager, and you’re excited to be more hands-on again—still leading through influence, mentoring, and technical direction, but closer to the code and the problem.
You’re not jaded—you still enjoy the craft, you’re curious, and you’re genuinely excited to learn (Rust, Kraken’s internals, and whatever else the problem demands).
You treat AI/agents as a force multiplier: you’re already a high-output engineer, and you use agentic tooling to accelerate iteration, improve test coverage, and raise quality—without outsourcing judgment.
The opportunity
Architect and ship new backend capabilities that integrate AI-adjacent functionality into Kraken’s core systems
Design distributed services that meet high standards for reliability, performance, and correctness
Work on latency-sensitive and real-time system components
Own end-to-end technical design, from protocol and service boundaries through production deployment
Leverage modern AI tooling to significantly accelerate development velocity while maintaining engineering rigor
Collaborate with senior leadership and cross-functional partners on high-impact, technically ambitious initiatives
Deliver complex systems on ambitious timelines without sacrificing quality
Skills you should HODL
Strong expertise in Rust (preferred) or another systems-level language such as Go, C++, or similar, with the ability to quickly become productive in Rust
You don’t just bring your experience and perspective—you invest in becoming an expert in the Kraken platform, adopt our practices, and help keep our systems consistent as you evolve and improve them over time.
Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems in production environments
Strong understanding of low-level networking, concurrency models, and performance tradeoffs
Experience building real-time or latency-sensitive systems
Proven track record of repeatedly shipping complex, high-impact technical systems
Demonstrated ability to independently own architecture and delivery in ambiguous environments
Practical experience applying or integrating AI capabilities into backend systems or deep fluency using AI tooling to enhance engineering productivity
Strong systems thinking. You reason from first principles and care how things work under the hood
Nice to haves
Contributions to high-performance or open-source infrastructure projects
Kubernetes or Hashicorp stack (Nomad/Consul/Vault) experience
Experience in high-growth, startup-style engineering teams
Past experience with crypto or trading related projects
Full-stack/Swiss Army knife: you know to invest in local developer experience and tooling to make your projects quick to contribute to, you can switch from product ideation to architecture, from code to operations, and from benchmarking to load testing easily.