Engineering Manager: Lead Frontend & Cross-Platform UX

Kraken; South Africa; On-site; ZAR 1,200,000 - 1,800,000; Full time

Job summary

Kraken is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a cross-functional Consumer pod, guiding frontend (React/React Native) and backend (Rust) engineers to deliver seamless user experiences across Kraken’s consumer surfaces.

You will work with Product, Design, and other Engineering Leaders to ensure exceptional UX, technical quality, and reliability for a global user base. This role emphasizes leadership, architectural discipline, and a culture of growth.

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading engineering teams delivering customer-facing products at scale.
• Experience managing combined frontend and backend engineering teams.
• Deep technical background in React Native with a solid understanding of modern frontend architectures.
• Strong cross-functional leadership, able to align frontend and backend efforts in a complex, multi-platform environment.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Empathy for the customer and a passion for building intuitive, performant consumer experiences.
• Experience building large-scale consumer or financial products.

Responsibilities

• Lead a cross-functional team of frontend and backend engineers responsible for core Krak consumer experiences.
• Own the end-to-end UX for key Krak features across mobile and client platforms.
• Guide the delivery of high-quality consumer applications, with a focus on usability, performance, and scale.
• Partner with Product Managers and Designers to define and deliver high-impact features with measurable business and customer value.
• Collaborate with other Engineering Managers and Tech Leads to maintain consistent engineering standards across services and client platforms.
• Champion engineering excellence, maintainable architectures, and code quality.
• Mentor engineers and foster a culture of technical growth, collaboration, and inclusivity.
• Strengthen team organization and delivery using agile processes, project tracking, and engineering metrics (e.g., DORA, cycle time).

Skills

Leadership

Frontend & Backend leadership

React Native

Cross-functional leadership

Communication

Customer UX focus

Large-scale products

Tools

Rust

Go

C++

Job description

Kraken is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a cross-functional Consumer pod, guiding frontend (React/React Native) and backend (Rust) engineers to deliver seamless user experiences across Kraken’s consumer surfaces.

You will work with Product, Design, and other Engineering Leaders to ensure exceptional UX, technical quality, and reliability for a global user base. This role emphasizes leadership, architectural discipline, and a culture of growth.