Senior Software Engineer – AI Infrastructure
Job description
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.
The AI Infrastructure team builds and operates the production systems that power intelligent agents at scale. This team sits at the foundation of the agent platform, ensuring that model inference, orchestration, and execution layers are reliable, observable, and performant under real-world load.
Working closely with the Agent Systems team and broader infrastructure partners, this group owns the core primitives that enable agents to safely operate across internal systems. The environment is high-scale and high-stakes — systems serve millions of users and must meet strict reliability, latency, and correctness standards.
This is a deeply production-oriented team. Engineers here combine strong systems thinking with applied ML infrastructure experience, building in Rust and operating services where performance and failure modes matter.
The opportunity
Design and build the infrastructure layer powering AI agent systems in production
Develop high-performance Rust services that handle model inference, orchestration, and execution
Architect scalable systems capable of supporting millions of users and high request throughput
Build reliable ML infrastructure and MLOps patterns for model deployment, evaluation, and monitoring
Define guardrails, observability, and failure handling for agent-driven workflows
Optimize latency, throughput, and cost across inference and orchestration layers
Partner closely with the Agent Systems team to translate experimental prototypes into hardened production systems
Contribute to foundational infrastructure decisions in a high-scale, high-impact environment
What You Bring
5+ years of experience building and operating high-scale production systems
Strong proficiency in Rust and systems-level programming
Deep understanding of distributed systems, reliability engineering, and performance optimization
Experience operating services serving millions of users or high-throughput workloads
Familiarity with ML infrastructure, model serving, or MLOps in production environments
Experience designing observability, monitoring, and failure recovery systems
Strong collaboration skills working across infrastructure and applied engineering teams
High ownership mindset in high-stakes production environment
Nice to haves
Experience building infrastructure for agent-based or LLM-powered systems
Background in high-performance networking, async systems, or low-latency architectures
Experience with container orchestration and cloud-native infrastructure
Familiarity with evaluation frameworks and model performance monitoring at scale
Experience working in fast-moving 0→1 or platform-building teams
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.