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Kraken, one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms with over 10 million users, is seeking a Head of Financial Systems Engineering to lead the modernization of its financial infrastructure. You will report to the CFO and own the engineering vision for Kraken's financial systems, translating Finance priorities into a clear technical strategy and delivery roadmap.
Your core responsibilities include:
- Lead and grow a team of specialists across financial systems, data engineering, integrations, and ledger-related services, establishing clear ownership and developing technical leaders.
- Assess the current landscape of fragmented data, processes, and technical debt. Define a target architecture and phased transformation plan based on evidence, business needs, and sound engineering judgment.
- Set standards for the completeness, quality, lineage, and ownership of financial data from source events through transaction and balance records, reconciliation, accounting, and reporting.
- Contribute to architecture decisions for ledgers, subledgers, financial data models, APIs, and integrations across fiat and crypto activity.
- Partner with Accounting and Treasury to improve account and legal entity attribution, financial controls, reconciliation, exception handling, and traceability of records across internal and external systems.
- Lead modernization and migration without disrupting close, reporting, fund movements, or other critical Finance operations. Define validation checkpoints and criteria for retiring legacy processes.
- Establish end-to-end testing, documentation, observability, release controls, and incident response practices that account for the financial impact of upstream changes.
- Partner with Product, platform engineering, Risk, Security, Compliance, Tax, and Legal on system boundaries, access controls, resilience, regulatory needs, and auditability.
- Evaluate build, buy, and integration options; review consequential designs; and communicate architectural decisions, sequencing, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to Finance and Engineering leaders.
In your first year, you'll focus on building foundations for a more reliable, scalable Finance architecture: moving key reconciliations from monthly to daily cadence with clear ownership, reducing root-cause analysis time from weeks to days, mapping and validating source tables and transformations that feed financial statements, and completing UAT data lake connections for end-to-end testing.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience, including leading experienced teams through complex financial systems or data architecture change.
- Strong track record of hiring, coaching, and developing specialists while creating clear ownership, high engineering standards, and effective cross-functional partnerships.
- Deep understanding of ledgers, subledgers, double-entry concepts, reconciliation, settlement, and the path from operational event to auditable financial record.
- Experience with crypto or digital asset infrastructure and the challenges of connecting on-chain activity, internal balances, custody or wallet flows, and traditional financial systems.
- Strong technical judgment in distributed systems, data engineering, APIs, event-driven processing, and integrations across complex platforms.
- Experience defining a target architecture and delivering a transformation roadmap across fragmented or legacy systems while sustaining production reliability.
- Experience designing for data completeness, accuracy, lineage, reconciliation, access control, and auditability.
- Sound judgment in production operations, including incident response, monitoring, debugging, change management, and reliability improvements.
- Ability to partner with senior Finance and Engineering leaders and translate financial, operational, and control needs into a practical engineering roadmap.
- Ability to lead experts and make informed architecture decisions without needing to be the deepest specialist in every domain; clear communication of priorities and tradeoffs to executives and technical teams.
- Experience with Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, or Python; finance applications such as NetSuite, Kyriba, or BlackLine; and SOX or SOC control environments is valuable.
