Head of Financial Systems Engineering

The role

The Head of Financial Systems Engineering will lead the engineering vision and technical strategy for Kraken's financial systems. This person will manage a team of specialists to connect products, payments, and digital assets to financial data, ledgers, and controls.

What you will do

• Report to the CFO and lead the engineering vision for Kraken's financial systems
• Define a target architecture and phased transformation plan
• Lead, coach, and grow a team of specialists
• Set standards for the completeness, quality, lineage, and ownership of financial data
• Contribute to architecture decisions for ledgers, subledgers, and financial data models
• Partner with Accounting and Treasury to improve financial controls and reconciliation
• Lead modernization and migration without disrupting critical Finance operations
• Establish end-to-end testing, documentation, observability, and incident response practices
• Partner with Product, Risk, Security, Compliance, Tax, and Legal on system boundaries and auditability
• Evaluate build, buy, and integration options

Required qualifications

• Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience
• Experience leading experienced teams through complex financial systems or data architecture change
• Track record of hiring, coaching, and developing specialists
• Deep understanding of ledgers, subledgers, double-entry concepts, reconciliation, and settlement
• Experience with crypto or digital asset infrastructure
• Technical judgment in distributed systems, data engineering, APIs, and event-driven processing
• Experience defining target architecture and delivering transformation roadmaps
• Experience designing for data completeness, accuracy, lineage, reconciliation, access control, and auditability
• Judgment in production operations, including incident response, monitoring, and change management
• Ability to partner with senior Finance and Engineering leaders

Nice to have

• Experience with Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, or Python
• Experience with finance applications such as NetSuite, Kyriba, or BlackLine
• Experience with SOX or SOC control environments

Before you apply

• Applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance or graduation
• Candidates may be asked to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments

About the company

Payward is the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks. Kraken is a crypto platform that offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services.