Head of Financial Systems Engineering
Payward, Inc. is the parent company and operating platform behind Kraken and a portfolio spanning trading, custody, payments, lending, tokenized assets, onchain finance, and benchmarks.
Funding history
Investors
Projects
About Payward, Inc.
Payward operates unified financial infrastructure across crypto and traditional markets, including shared liquidity, risk and margin systems, collateral and settlement, compliance, and licensing. Its first-party portfolio includes Kraken, Kraken Pro, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, CF Benchmarks, Reap, Krak, Kraken Prime, Kraken OTC, Kraken Custody, and Bitnomial.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will report to the CFO and set the engineering vision, target architecture, and delivery roadmap for financial systems. You will lead specialists, improve financial-data quality and lineage, modernize ledgers and integrations, strengthen reconciliation and controls, and ensure reliable, auditable production operations.
Requirements
- Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience
- Experience leading experienced teams through complex financial-systems or data-architecture change
- Deep understanding of ledgers, subledgers, double-entry concepts, reconciliation, settlement, and auditable financial records
- Experience with crypto or digital-asset infrastructure
- Technical judgment in distributed systems, data engineering, APIs, event-driven processing, and integrations
- Experience delivering transformation roadmaps across fragmented or legacy systems
- Experience designing for data completeness, accuracy, lineage, reconciliation, access control, and auditability
- Experience with production operations, incident response, monitoring, debugging, change management, and reliability
- Ability to partner with senior finance and engineering leaders
- Clear communication of priorities and tradeoffs
Responsibilities
- Lead the engineering vision and roadmap for financial systems
- Assess fragmented systems and define a target architecture and transformation plan
- Lead, coach, and grow specialists in financial systems, data engineering, integrations, and ledger services
- Set standards for financial-data completeness, quality, lineage, and ownership
- Guide architecture decisions for ledgers, subledgers, APIs, data models, and integrations
- Improve attribution, controls, reconciliation, exception handling, and record traceability
- Lead modernization and migration without disrupting critical finance operations
- Establish testing, documentation, observability, release controls, and incident response practices
- Partner on system boundaries, access controls, resilience, regulatory needs, and auditability
- Evaluate build, buy, and integration options and communicate architectural tradeoffs
Benefits
- Equity
- Bonus
- Wellness allowance
- Medical coverage
- Dental coverage
- Vision coverage
- 401(k)
Hiring Process
May include job-related skills or work-style assessments.
