Infrastructure Engineer - Core Infrastructure

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 Core Infrastructure – Platforms team is responsible for the foundational platform that powers all Kraken on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

We design and operate the systems that enable all engineering at Kraken; bringing together compute, storage, orchestration, and more into a unified, reliable platform. You’ll join a senior group of engineers working closely with SRE, Networking, and Security to deliver a stable, scalable, and secure foundation for all workloads.

We’re looking for someone to help evolve and scale our OpenStack platform as a core part of our next-generation infrastructure.

The opportunity

• Gain hands-on experience across OpenStack platform operations: compute (Nova), networking (Neutron), and provisioning (Ironic)

• Learn storage systems fundamentals, including Ceph architecture, operations, and troubleshooting

• Handle feature requests and support tickets for both OpenStack and Storage systems, learning core concepts along the way

• Work with senior engineers to troubleshoot complex issues across the full stack, reducing operational burden from the team

• Understand how storage integrates with our infrastructure (whether through OpenStack Cinder or Kubernetes CSI)

• Build automation and tooling to improve team efficiency and reduce toil across both platforms

• Contribute to documentation and runbooks for operations and troubleshooting

• Participate in on-call rotation to maintain platform reliability

What you bring

• Proven experience of 3+ year of working as an Infrastructure/Platform/DevOps Engineer, Software Engineer or similar roles

• Strong passion for providing technical guidance to stakeholders, with excellent communication skills and a customer-focused approach to resolving compute / storage related requests, removing blockers, and enabling engineering teams to succeed

• Hands-on experience building and maintaining at least one of Openstack private cloud or Ceph networked storage platforms

• Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals

• Strong Linux systems knowledge: comfortable at the shell, understanding processes, networking basics, file systems, permissions

• Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, ports, IP addressing, basic routing, TLS, PKI concepts

• Ability to leverage AI tools and agents such as Claude and OpenAI to efficiently deliver business value

• Scripting or programming experience (Python, Bash, Go, or similar)

Nice to haves

• Working experience running Kubernetes clusters

• Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) or on-premises infrastructure

• Knowledge of Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools

• Experience with storage systems (e.g., Ceph/Rook)

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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