Senior Software Engineer – Agent Systems

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.
Proof of 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.
The Agent Systems team is a 0→1 engineering group building internal AI-powered agents that interact directly with company systems. The mandate is to dramatically increase internal speed of execution through automation, intelligent inference, and workflow orchestration.
This team operates at the intersection of AI, backend systems, and applied product engineering. The work is pragmatic and fast-moving — prototypes are expected, but the bar for production reliability remains high. Engineers on this team move fluidly between experimentation and shipping, building systems that reason over user interactions and take meaningful action across internal tools.
You’ll work closely with cross-functional partners across product, infrastructure, and internal operations to deploy agent-driven capabilities that compound leverage across the organization.
The opportunity
Build and ship AI-powered agent systems that automate internal workflows and decision paths
Design and implement inference pipelines that reason over user interactions across internal systems
Prototype quickly to validate agent behaviors, then productionize what proves valuable
Architect backend services that integrate with multiple internal APIs and data sources
Define patterns for safe, observable, and controllable agent execution
Collaborate cross-functionally to identify high-leverage automation opportunities
Improve system speed, reliability, and signal quality as usage scales
Contribute to foundational design decisions for a 0→1 agent platform
Skills You Should HODL
5+ years of experience building and shipping production software systems
Strong backend engineering fundamentals (APIs, distributed systems, data modeling, reliability)
Experience building fullstack systems, with comfort working across backend and occasional frontend surfaces
Hands-on experience working with AI/ML systems, LLMs, or inference pipelines in production
Ability to prototype rapidly while maintaining a clear path to production-grade architecture
Strong systems thinking — able to reason about orchestration, failure modes, and observability
Comfort operating in ambiguous, 0→1 environments with high ownership
Nice to haves
Experience building or operating agent-based systems or autonomous workflows
Familiarity with prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, or model performance tuning
Experience integrating with internal enterprise systems (CRM, support tools, analytics platforms, etc.)
Background in building developer platforms or internal tooling
Experience designing guardrails, sandboxing, or safety layers for AI systems
Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.
Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.
We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
Our commitment
Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.
We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.
As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.
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