Staff Software Engineer, Growth

About Kraken

Kraken is a mission-focused company deeply rooted in crypto values, dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto for financial freedom and inclusion. As a Staff Software Engineer, Growth, you’ll join a world-class team of Krakenites across 70+ countries, united by a passion for unlocking the potential of crypto and blockchain technology. For over a decade, Kraken has attracted top talent by focusing on its mission and crypto ethos, developing premium products for experienced traders, institutions, and newcomers with industry-leading security, education, and client support.

The Growth Engineering Team

The Growth Engineering team is responsible for building the initial user experiences that connect people to Kraken's ecosystem and ensure their continued engagement. This includes designing and shipping systems for marketing funnels, signup and KYC flows, and crucial features that help new users fund accounts and explore products. This team directly influences company growth, global reach, and user engagement at scale, serving millions of users worldwide.

How We Work

• Engineers are given ownership and trusted to deliver high-impact work with craftsmanship and accountability.
• The team moves quickly, experiments often, and learns rapidly from data and feedback.
• Work is conducted asynchronously across time zones, fostering open communication and shared goals.

Why This Role Matters

As a Staff Software Engineer, Growth, every decision you make will directly shape how people discover, trust, and engage with Kraken's products globally. You will set the technical direction through clear context, empowering others to execute with confidence, and mentor by example to raise the technical bar across teams. Your work will ensure systems scale with performance, reliability, and purpose. This pivotal role bridges product, marketing, and infrastructure, translating ideas into measurable results by leading with accountability and empathy, aligning teams, and building sustainable systems for growth through engineering excellence.

The Opportunity

This high-impact, hands-on technical leadership role involves leading complex, cross-cutting technical initiatives vital for user acquisition, activation, and retention. You will drive architectural direction, mentor engineers, and ensure that built systems are reliable, scalable, and their impact is measurable. This position is ideal for engineers adept at balancing product velocity with long-term technical excellence while translating business goals into growth-driving systems.

• Lead the technical direction for key Growth initiatives, including experimentation platforms and global onboarding/engagement systems.
• Design and evolve distributed, high-scale systems for user acquisition and retention.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Data teams to identify growth opportunities and develop reliable, measurable engineering solutions.
• Mentor engineers across Product and Platform teams, guiding architecture, design, and execution.
• Maintain high engineering standards across the stack, focusing on reliability, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with various teams to align on architecture, tooling, and technical strategy.
• Contribute to and influence the broader engineering culture by advocating for craftsmanship, impact, and accountability.

Skills You Should HODL (Required)

• Proven experience leading large-scale technical projects or owning critical systems end-to-end.
• Deep expertise in TypeScript or Rust, Kraken's core languages, with versatility to work full-stack.
• Experience with other languages like Go, Python, or Ruby is a plus, demonstrating adaptability.
• Broad technical range and curiosity, comfortable diving into any layer of the stack (front-end to backend infrastructure).
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, reliability, and performance optimization.
• Experience designing systems that balance experimentation velocity with long-term maintainability.
• A product mindset, thinking in terms of outcomes and user impact.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills across engineering, product, and design.
• Experience operating autonomously in a distributed, remote-first environment.
• A commitment to technical excellence, ownership, craftsmanship, and accountability.

Nice-to-Haves

• Background in growth engineering, experimentation platforms, or developer experience.
• Experience with infrastructure and tooling such as Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Redis, or GitLab CI/CD.
• Track record of influencing technical strategy across multiple teams or domains.

Key skills/competency

• Growth Engineering
• Technical Leadership
• Distributed Systems
• Scalability
• Reliability
• TypeScript
• Rust
• Experimentation Platforms
• User Acquisition
• Cross-functional Collaboration