Senior Staff Software Engineer

### Who you are
- 10+ years of experience designing and implementing high-performance backend systems, preferably in finance, trading, or distributed environments
- Deep expertise in at least one systems language (C++, Go, or Rust) and solid scripting knowledge in Python
- Strong familiarity with Linux systems, including low-level debugging, concurrency, and profiling
- Experience building and optimizing low-latency, high-throughput services handling large-scale transaction volumes
- Demonstrated ability to make data-driven architectural decisions and communicate trade-offs clearly
- Experience with distributed systems, messaging queues, and inter-service communication protocols (gRPC, REST, etc.)
- Familiarity with cryptocurrency markets, DeFi, and blockchain protocols is a major plus
- BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline

### What the job involves
- The Platform Team exists to accelerate engineering across Kraken by building and evolving the foundational infrastructure that powers development at scale. Its mission is to remove friction, solve systemic platform challenges, and ensure teams can ship quickly, reliably, and efficiently
- The team defines and enforces engineering standards across APIs and services, improving consistency, performance, and scalability across the stack. It drives platform-wide architecture improvements, strengthens service interfaces, and ensures long-term maintainability as the system evolves
- A core focus is performance and scale — proactively identifying bottlenecks, improving observability and tracing, and ensuring the platform stays ahead of production demands. The team establishes strong testing and performance baselines, enabling teams to automate stress testing and build confidently on a resilient foundation
- Operating cross-functionally across engineering, the Platform Team works at every layer of the stack — from low-level networking to service architecture — strengthening the core systems that enable the entire organization to execute faster and at higher quality
- Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps, SRE, and Security teams to ensure Kraken's platform is reliable, secure, and scalable
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers, influencing best practices in system design, testing, and performance optimization
- Take ownership of system-wide architectural initiatives and shape long-term technical strategy
- Contribute to the team’s incident response, root cause analysis, and system hardening efforts
- Champion continuous improvement by introducing new tools, techniques, and technologies that raise the bar for backend engineering

### Benefits
- Remote-first and work from anywhere
- Competitive salary regardless of location, and the option to be paid in crypto
- Equity grants offered with most roles
- Flexible paid time off
- Wellness Program that includes a fitness coach, free access to wellbeing apps, and a monthly wellness stipend
- Mental health and life coaching benefits for you and your dependents
- Startup-level autonomy with the scale and learning opportunities of a global platform
- Remote workstation set-up bonus
- And more!