Head of Exchange Infrastructure at Kraken

Building the Future of Open Finance Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system. Before you apply, we encourage you to explore our culture page to understand what drives us and how we work. The team Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients. We're looking for a Head of Exchange Infrastructure to own the layer every Kraken product is built on: the matching engine, core infrastructure, third-party custody, the algo engine and the API engine. Kraken grew up as a set of vertically integrated products, each with its own engine and its own APIs. This role consolidates them into a single exchange stack that serves every product and every interface. You will lead a team of four to five product managers, partnered with an engineering manager. It is a senior, independent team, which means you get leverage quickly and you are expected to stay close to the work. The opportunity Own the product vision and roadmap for the exchange layer: matching engine, core infrastructure, third-party custody, algo engine and API engine Lead and grow a team of four to five product managers, and set the bar for product craft across the layer Lead the consolidation of multiple matching engines into one, starting with US derivatives, then international derivatives, then spot Build interface-agnostic, so every product team and every interface can build on the same platform rather than their own Define success metrics (p99 latency, throughput, uptime, resiliency) and hold teams accountable to them Partner with engineering leaders across exchange and core infrastructure to sequence the migration without disrupting live markets Partner with Risk and Credit Infrastructure so a client can hold one account and trade every product against it Anticipate industry shifts and shape our platform to stay ahead Align cross-functional teams (product, engineering, risk, compliance) around the exchange strategy What you bring Senior product leader with experience in exchange, trading, or high-performance platforms Experience managing and developing product managers, on a team senior enough to run without you in the room Happy to be a player-coach. This team is independent, so you will own roadmaps and write specs yourself at times, not only review them Proven ability to set product vision and translate it into a long-term roadmap Strong understanding of matching engine and market data architecture, and the tradeoffs low latency forces Experience building platforms for internal customers, with