Staff Engineer, Verification Systems & Growth

Kraken International; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Payward is seeking a Staff Engineer to own the technical direction of verification services across the KYC/KYB flow. You will be hands-on across the stack, shaping architecture and defining what we own vs. what we vendor-build to meet regulatory requirements.

This high-impact role requires deep Rust expertise and a track record of delivering secure, scalable systems in crypto/fintech environments. You’ll mentor engineers and ensure fast, safe operations as the platform grows.

Qualifications

• Around eight years building and running production systems.
• Deep, fluent expertise in Rust across frontend/back-end integration.
• Architected durable systems with resilience to failures.
• Led teams to faster delivery through patterns, tooling, or mentoring.
• Experience with high-stakes domains: compliance, payments, security.
• Strong on distributed systems, service contracts, secure design; integrated third‑party APIs.
• Familiar with or able to ramp on gRPC, Temporal, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, GitLab CI.

Responsibilities

• Set the shape of the verification services and their contracts across the KYC/KYB flow.
• Decide how to abstract KYC and KYB vendors to reduce outages.
• Design fail-closed behavior and audit trails for regulatory scrutiny.
• Identify and eliminate recurring classes of failure.
• Write and drive architecture decisions (ADRs) and enforce security at design time.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, code, and feedback.
• Drive faster verification with fewer wrong decisions and more automated certainty.

Skills

Rust

Distributed systems

APIs & contracts

Mentoring

Security & compliance

KYC/KYB familiarity

High-stakes decision making

Customer-related integration

Tools

gRPC

Temporal

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

MySQL/MariaDB

Redis

GitLab CI

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.

Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work.

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.

The Pro Verifications team decides whether a business signing up on the Pro side is who it says it is, and whether we're allowed to onboard it. That means figuring out who actually owns the business, running it against sanctions and watchlists, and doing all of it fast enough that a real customer doesn't lose patience and leave. Every Pro customer hits these systems, so slow or wrong is very visible — and the team is early, which means whoever joins gets to decide how a lot of it works instead of inheriting it.

How We Work

• We deploy constantly, almost always behind a flag, in pieces small enough to pull back fast.

• Security and compliance show up at design time, not as a gate at the end.

• Every story is tied to a metric it's meant to move — if work isn't on the board, it doesn't get staffed.

• At this level, you're expected to shape these standards, not just work inside them.

The opportunity

As a Staff Engineer on Pro Verifications, you'll own the technical direction for how verification is built here — the architecture, the patterns other engineers work inside, and the calls about what we own versus what we lean on a vendor for. You'll be hands-on across the stack, drive out entire classes of recurring failure rather than patching them one at a time, and design the fail-closed and audit behavior that keeps regulators satisfied.

This is a high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role for engineers who've built where being wrong has real consequences, and who want to shape a system that stays fast, safe, and defensible as it grows.

• Set the shape of the verification services and their contracts across the KYC/KYB flow.

• Decide how we abstract KYC and KYB vendors so a bad provider day doesn't turn into an outage.

• Design fail-closed behavior and audit trails that hold up under regulatory scrutiny.

• Identify the classes of failure that keep recurring and remove them for good.

• Write and drive architecture decisions (ADRs), and hold the line on security and compliance at design time, not as a late gate.

• Mentor and raise the bar for senior engineers through design reviews, code, and direct feedback.

• Be measured on whether verification gets faster, more of it decides itself, fewer decisions are wrong, and the systems stay up — and on whether the team got stronger for you being on it.

What you bring

• Around eight years building and running production systems, with a track record of owning a domain's technical direction, not just delivering inside one.

• Deep, fluent expertise in Rust, with the versatility to work across TypeScript and React where verification meets the customer.

• You've set architecture other people build on, and it held up — you can point to specific classes of failure you designed out, not just incidents you fixed.

• You've made teams faster through patterns, tooling, or mentoring — engineers around you got better and shipped more because of calls you made.

• You've built where being wrong had real consequences: compliance, payments, security, or anywhere a bad call costs more than a rough user experience.

• Strong on distributed systems, service contracts, and secure design — you've integrated third-party APIs that couldn't be trusted, with real timeouts, retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, and backup paths that actually get tested.

• Comfortable with, or able to quickly ramp on, gRPC, Temporal, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, and GitLab CI.

Nice to haves

• Direct experience with KYC, KYB, or fraud work, including integrating providers like Trulioo, Persona, or ComplyAdvantage.

• Comfort building with AI in the loop.

• Time spent in crypto, fintech, or another space regulators pay close attention to.

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.

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