Staff Engineer - Growth - Verifications

As a Staff Engineer on Pro Verifications at Payward (the parent company behind Kraken), you own the technical direction for how verification is built across the KYC/KYB flow. You work hands-on across the stack, designing the architecture and patterns that other engineers build within, deciding what the team owns versus what they lean on vendors for, and ensuring the system stays fast, safe, and defensible as it scales.

What you'll do

• Set the shape of the verification services and their contracts across the KYC/KYB flow
• Design how the team abstracts 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, as well as 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 have

• 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

About Payward

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions. Kraken offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services for both individual investors and institutional clients, built to advance an open, global financial system.