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.

Kraken's engineers build a lot of software. Developer Platform AI builds the AI systems they use to do it: agents that write and review code, simple access to the best models in the tools they already use, and the infrastructure that connects AI to our internal systems.

This is a small team with a lot of reach. The tools you ship will change how engineers across Kraken work every day, and you'll see that happen directly. The work spans agent platforms, code review, LLM routing and cost controls, MCP integrations with tools like Slack, Jira and GitLab, and the security and observability that make all of it safe to run.

If you want to work on applied AI with real users from day one, this is that job.

The Opportunity

Build the platform Kraken's agents run on: dynamic sandboxes, Slack workflows, approval gates, memory, and agents that can take real engineering work from start to finish

Build our code review agent so merge requests get fast, useful feedback, and human reviewers can spend their time on design, risk and judgment

Give engineers access to approved models in Claude Code, Cursor and Codex with no setup, so trying a new model takes seconds

Build the connections between AI and the tools engineers use every day, including Slack, Jira, GitLab and internal APIs

Route LLM requests to the right model for the job, balancing speed, quality and cost

Work with Security to build access control, audit logging, budgets and cost reporting into the platform

Own features end to end, from design through production, and keep them reliable alongside SRE

Stay close to the engineers using what you build, and use their feedback to decide what comes next

Skills You Should HODL

Solid experience building and running backend or platform services in production

Strong skills in Rust, Python, TypeScript or Go, with a habit of writing well-tested, maintainable code

Comfort with Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability and a major cloud provider

Good judgment about reliability, security and operational tradeoffs

The ability to lead a technical design, write it down clearly, and work with teams outside your own

Ownership: you can take something from idea to production and keep it working once it's there

Nice to Haves

Hands-on experience with LLM APIs: streaming, token accounting, rate limits, provider failure modes

Experience building agent systems, code review or static analysis tooling, sandboxed execution, or developer tools

Experience with API gateways, proxies or traffic management

Familiarity with OAuth, OIDC and role-based access control

Contributions to open-source infrastructure or developer-platform projects

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.