Head of Financial Systems Engineering

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, Ninja Trader, 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.

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.

• 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

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