Staff Engineer - Growth - Verifications

As a Staff Engineer on Kraken's Pro Verifications team, you own the technical direction for how verification is built across the platform. You'll architect the KYC/KYB flow, design how the team abstracts vendor relationships to prevent outages, and build fail-closed systems that satisfy regulators. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for engineers who have shipped systems where being wrong has real consequences.

What you'll do

• Set the shape of verification services and their contracts across the KYC/KYB flow
• Decide how to abstract KYC and KYB vendors so a provider outage doesn't cascade into a platform outage
• Design fail-closed behavior and audit trails that hold up under regulatory scrutiny
• Identify recurring classes of failure and remove them entirely rather than patching them individually
• Write and drive architecture decisions (ADRs), holding the line on security and compliance at design time
• Mentor and raise the bar for senior engineers through design reviews, code feedback, and direct mentoring
• Be measured on whether verification gets faster, more decisions are made automatically, error rates drop, systems stay reliable, and the team gets stronger

What you bring

• Around eight years building and running production systems, with a track record of owning a domain's technical direction
• Deep, fluent expertise in Rust, with versatility across TypeScript and React
• A demonstrated ability to set architecture that other engineers build on and it holds up, with specific examples of classes of failure you designed out
• Experience making teams faster through patterns, tooling, or mentoring, where engineers around you got better and shipped more
• A background building systems where being wrong had real consequences: compliance, payments, security, or similar domains where mistakes cost more than a degraded user experience
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, service contracts, and secure design, including integrating third-party APIs with real timeouts, retries, idempotency, circuit breakers, and tested backup paths
• Comfort with, or ability 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 integration with 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, founded in 2011 and trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services. Kraken is owned by Payward, which also operates NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks.