Staff Software Engineer – Special Projects @ Chairman Office

Proof of work

The team

In this team, you’ll help expand the Kraken platform by building new backend capabilities and primitives that unlock new product experiences. You’ll work in a high-trust, fast-moving environment where projects are often early-stage and ambiguous, including work that’s AI-adjacent and deeply technical, with an emphasis on systems-level thinking and engineering excellence.

You’ll collaborate with senior leadership and cross-functional partners to design and deliver new backend capabilities that interface directly with core platform infrastructure. The team values engineers who care deeply about how things work under the hood while remaining pragmatic and outcome-oriented.

The ideal candidate

You are a driven, positive, self-motivated thinker-doer. You bring the rare mix of deep technical strength and strong day-to-day presence: sharp systems intuition, calm execution under pressure, and a collaborative style that makes people want to build with you.

• You have high engineering horsepower and strong fundamentals (systems thinking, debugging, architecture, performance), while staying practical and outcome-oriented.
• You do what must be done to move the work forward—and you leave things better than you found them: improving coding standards, tests, local dev experience, observability, and dependency health, not just shipping the happy-path feature.
• You hold a clear effort/reward lens: you invest where it compounds, avoid perfectionism for its own sake, and consistently prioritize the outcomes that matter.
• You’re low-ego, high-standards: you raise the quality bar through example, thoughtful reviews, and good taste—without creating friction.
• You communicate clearly, bring calm energy, and help teams stay optimistic and focused when timelines are real and constraints are sharp.
• You’ve likely been a tech lead or engineering manager, and you’re excited to be more hands-on again—still leading through influence, mentoring, and technical direction, but closer to the code and the problem.
• You’re not jaded—you still enjoy the craft, you’re curious, and you’re genuinely excited to learn (Rust, Kraken’s internals, and whatever else the problem demands).
• You treat AI/agents as a force multiplier: you’re already a high-output engineer, and you use agentic tooling to accelerate iteration, improve test coverage, and raise quality—without outsourcing judgment.

The opportunity

• Architect and ship new backend capabilities that integrate AI-adjacent functionality into Kraken’s core systems
• Design distributed services that meet high standards for reliability, performance, and correctness
• Work on latency-sensitive and real-time system components
• Own end-to-end technical design, from protocol and service boundaries through production deployment
• Leverage modern AI tooling to significantly accelerate development velocity while maintaining engineering rigor
• Collaborate with senior leadership and cross-functional partners on high-impact, technically ambitious initiatives
• Deliver complex systems on ambitious timelines without sacrificing quality

Skills you should HODL

• Strong expertise in Rust (preferred) or another systems-level language such as Go, C++, or similar, with the ability to quickly become productive in Rust
• You don’t just bring your experience and perspective—you invest in becoming an expert in the Kraken platform, adopt our practices, and help keep our systems consistent as you evolve and improve them over time.
• Deep experience designing and operating distributed systems in production environments
• Strong understanding of low-level networking, concurrency models, and performance tradeoffs
• Experience building real-time or latency-sensitive systems
• Proven track record of repeatedly shipping complex, high-impact technical systems
• Demonstrated ability to independently own architecture and delivery in ambiguous environments
• Practical experience integrating AI capabilities into backend systems or deep fluency using AI tooling to enhance engineering productivity
• Strong systems thinking. You reason from first principles and care how things work under the hood

Nice to haves

• Contributions to high-performance or open-source infrastructure projects
• Kubernetes or Hashicorp stack (Nomad/Consul/Vault) experience
• Experience in high-growth, startup-style engineering teams
• Past experience with crypto or trading related projects
• Full-stack/Swiss Army knife: you know to invest in local developer experience and tooling to make your projects quick to contribute to, you can switch from product ideation to architecture, from code to operations, and from benchmarking to load testing easily.