Senior Software Engineer - Dev Platform

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.

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 Dev Platform team builds the internal platform that Kraken's engineers use to build, ship and run software. Within Dev Platform, the AI Gateway is Kraken's company-wide LLM gateway: a single, governed entry point that gives teams self-service access to leading models from providers such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, with visibility into usage and cost, configurable budgets and rate limits, and routing across models and providers for efficiency and resilience.

The Opportunity

Build and extend the AI Gateway: new model and provider integrations, routing policies, budgets, rate limits, and usage and cost reporting

Design the APIs, SDKs and self-service tooling that let engineers across Kraken onboard to the gateway quickly and safely

Help teams migrate their LLM workloads onto the gateway with minimal disruption

Implement access control, key management and audit logging in partnership with Security

Instrument the gateway so teams can see latency, errors, token usage and cost for their own workloads

Own features end to end, from design through production, and keep the service reliable alongside SRE

Support internal users with clear documentation, debugging help and a tight feedback loop that shapes the roadmap

Contribute to code review, design documents and engineering practices across Dev Platform

Skills You Should HODL

Solid experience as a backend or platform software engineer building and operating APIs and distributed services in production

Strong skills in a backend language such as Rust, Python or TypeScript, with a habit of writing well-tested, maintainable code

Working knowledge of how LLM APIs behave: authentication, streaming responses, token accounting, rate limits and provider failure modes

Experience with observability, CI/CD and containers, and comfort with Kubernetes and a major cloud provider

Ability to design clean, well-documented APIs for internal customers and to weigh their feedback

Clear written and verbal communication, and the ownership to carry work from idea to production

Nice to Haves

Experience with API gateways, proxies or traffic management

Experience building LLM-powered systems, including routing, caching, evaluation or cost controls

Familiarity with authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth, OIDC, RBAC)

Contributions to open-source infrastructure or developer-platform projects

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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