Senior Software Engineer - Rust - Consumer

kraken.com; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Kraken is seeking a senior backend engineer to join a consumer-facing product team. You will focus on Rust backend services powering trading, payments, and crypto experiences for retail users, while also guiding architecture and technical direction.

The role combines hands-on Rust development with leadership, owning ambiguous multi-quarter problems and driving end-to-end product outcomes. Expect significant collaboration and an AI-assisted development workflow.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with deep Rust proficiency.
• Track record of owning systems, including architectural decisions in production.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and delivery of customer-facing Rust backend services covering trading, payments, and crypto flows.
• Take ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives from problem framing through shipped, measurable outcomes.
• Drive features end-to-end, raising the team's standard for end-to-end product ownership.
• Partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap and own outcomes and metrics.
• Lead cross-team initiatives spanning multiple product groups and align sequencing of work.
• Mentor mid-level engineers, review designs, and establish patterns for future work.

Skills

Rust backend systems

Distributed systems

Architecture ownership

Mentoring & design reviews

AI-assisted development

Cross-team collaboration

Job description

Role overview

A senior engineering role on a consumer-facing product team at a long-established cryptocurrency platform, focused on backend services that power trading, payments, and crypto experiences for retail users. The position combines hands-on Rust development with technical leadership: setting architectural direction, owning ambiguous multi-quarter problems, and raising the engineering bar across the team. The work emphasizes an AI-assisted development workflow and end-to-end product ownership that extends beyond the backend boundary.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and delivery of customer-facing Rust backend services covering trading, payments, and crypto flows.
• Take ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives from problem framing through shipped, measured outcomes.
• Drive features end-to-end, raising the team's standard for what end-to-end product ownership looks like.
• Partner with product leadership to shape the roadmap, not just execute against it, and own the resulting outcomes and metrics.
• Lead cross-team initiatives that span trading infrastructure, platform, and other product groups, building alignment and sequencing work effectively.
• Mentor mid-level engineers, review designs before code is written, and leave behind patterns that make future work easier.
• Use AI extensively across the development workflow and help define what good AI-assisted engineering looks like for the team.

Requirements

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with deep Rust proficiency, including network services, async code, and distributed systems (RPC protocols, Kafka, event-driven architectures).
• A track record of owning systems, not just features, including making architectural decisions in production and explaining the tradeoffs in hindsight.
• Product engineering mindset with experience going from problem to implementation to launch to measurable user impact.
• Demonstrated impact through others: mentoring, design review, technical writing, or setting standards that changed how a team operated.
• Experience driving work that crosses organizational boundaries where alignment and sequencing were as hard as the implementation.
• An AI-first development approach, with active use of AI for coding, understanding codebases, and validating implementations.

Nice to have

• Full-stack experience with React/TypeScript or comparable frameworks.
• Cryptocurrency or blockchain domain knowledge.
• Experience building and scaling consumer products at meaningful user scale.
• Experience introducing AI tooling or workflows to an engineering team.