Head of Financial Systems Engineering

Kraken; United States; Remote; USD 220,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

Kraken is seeking a senior leader to own the engineering vision for its financial systems, reporting to the CFO. Translate Finance priorities into a practical architecture and delivery roadmap across data, reconciliation, and reporting.

You will lead a team of specialists, define data completeness and auditability standards, and partner with Accounting, Treasury, Risk, and Legal to ensure controls and governance. Modernize infrastructure while keeping close financial operations running smoothly.

Qualifications

• Extensive software engineering and leadership experience in finance or data architectures.
• Proven ability to lead teams through complex financial systems transformations.
• Strong ownership, high engineering standards, and cross-functional partnerships.
• Experience with crypto or digital asset infrastructure is a plus.
• Understanding of ledgers, reconciliation, and auditable records.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering vision for Kraken’s financial systems and set a strategic roadmap.
• Architect target landscape, reduce technical debt, and define phased transformation.
• Grow and coach a cross-functional team of specialists in financial systems and data.
• Set data quality, lineage, and auditability standards across source to report.
• Collaborate with Accounting, Treasury, Risk, Security, Compliance, and Legal on controls.
• Modernize infrastructure without disrupting close, reporting, or fund movements.
• Establish testing, observability, release controls, and incident response practices.

Skills

Software leadership

Team mentoring

Financial systems

Data architecture

Distributed systems

Rust

TypeScript/Node.js

Python

SOX/SOC controls

Tools

Rust

TypeScript/Node.js

Python

NetSuite

Kyriba

BlackLine

Job description

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 is on a mission to build the most trusted bridge between crypto and traditional finance. The Financial Systems Engineering team connects activity across products, payments, banking, and digital assets to the data, ledgers, controls, and applications Finance relies on. Our engineers bring expertise in data engineering, complex transaction flows, financial systems, and reconciliation. We partner with Treasury, Accounting, Tax, FP&A, Product, Risk, Security, Compliance, and platform engineering to make financial data reliable, explainable, and auditable.

The opportunity

• Report to the CFO and lead the engineering vision for Kraken’s financial systems, translating Finance priorities into a clear technical strategy and delivery roadmap

• Assess the current landscape, including fragmented data, processes, and technical debt. Define a target architecture and phased transformation plan based on evidence, business needs, and sound engineering judgment

• Lead, coach, and grow a team of specialists across financial systems, data engineering, integrations, and ledger-related services. Establish clear ownership and develop technical leaders

• Set standards for the completeness, quality, lineage, and ownership of financial data, from source events through transaction and balance records, reconciliation, accounting, and reporting

• Contribute to architecture decisions for ledgers, subledgers, financial data models, APIs, and integrations across fiat and crypto activity. Determine what should be standardized and where distinct product flows need governed treatment

• Partner with Accounting and Treasury to improve account and legal entity attribution, financial controls, reconciliation, exception handling, and the traceability of records across internal and external systems

• Lead modernization and migration without disrupting close, reporting, fund movements, or other critical Finance operations. Define validation checkpoints and criteria for retiring legacy processes and systems

• Establish end-to-end testing, documentation, observability, release controls, and incident response practices that account for the financial impact of upstream changes

• Partner with Product, platform engineering, Risk, Security, Compliance, Tax, and Legal on system boundaries, access controls, resilience, regulatory needs, and auditability

• Evaluate build, buy, and integration options; review consequential designs; and communicate architectural decisions, sequencing, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to Finance and Engineering leaders

What you will tackle first

In your first year, you’ll build the foundations for a more reliable, scalable Finance architecture:

• Move key reconciliations from a monthly to a daily cadence, with clear ownership and a process for resolving exceptions

• Reduce the time needed to find the root cause of reconciliation breaks from weeks to days

• Map and validate the source tables and transformations that actually feed financial statements, establishing lineage and ownership

• Complete the UAT data lake connections needed to test financial data flows end to end before changes reach production

What you bring

• Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience, including leading experienced teams through complex financial systems or data architecture change

• A strong track record of hiring, coaching, and developing specialists while creating clear ownership, high engineering standards, and effective cross-functional partnerships

• Deep understanding of ledgers, subledgers, double-entry concepts, reconciliation, settlement, and the path from an operational event to an auditable financial record

• Experience with crypto or digital asset infrastructure and the challenges of connecting on-chain activity, internal balances, custody or wallet flows, and traditional financial systems

• Strong technical judgment in distributed systems, data engineering, APIs, event-driven processing, and integrations across complex platforms

• Experience defining a target architecture and delivering a transformation roadmap across fragmented or legacy systems while sustaining production reliability

• Experience designing for data completeness, accuracy, lineage, reconciliation, access control, and auditability

• Sound judgment in production operations, including incident response, monitoring, debugging, change management, and reliability improvements

• Ability to partner with senior Finance and Engineering leaders and translate financial, operational, and control needs into a practical engineering roadmap

• Ability to lead experts and make informed architecture decisions without needing to be the deepest specialist in every domain; clear communication of priorities and tradeoffs to executives and technical teams

• Experience with Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, or Python; finance applications such as NetSuite, Kyriba, or BlackLine; and SOX or SOC control environments is valuable

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.