Staff Engineer - Growth - Verifications

As a Staff Engineer on Pro Verifications at Kraken, you own the technical direction for how verification is built across the platform. You shape the architecture and patterns other engineers work inside, make calls about what the team owns versus what it leans on vendors for, and design the fail-closed and audit behavior that keeps regulators satisfied. This is a high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role for engineers who've built where being wrong has real consequences.

What you'll do

• Set the shape of the verification services and their contracts across the KYC/KYB flow
• Decide 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, and on 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, with specific classes of failure you designed out, not just incidents you fixed
• You've made teams faster through patterns, tooling, or mentoring, with engineers around you getting better and shipping 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, including experience integrating 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 Kraken

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