Head of Financial Systems Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Report directly to the CFO while spearheading the engineering vision for Kraken’s financial systems.

• Convert Finance priorities into a comprehensive technical strategy and delivery roadmap.

• Evaluate fragmented data, processes, and technical debt; establish target architecture and a phased transformation plan.

• Lead, mentor, and develop specialists across financial systems, data engineering, integrations, and ledger-related services.

• Set standards for the completeness, quality, lineage, and ownership of financial data.

• Contribute to architectural decisions regarding ledgers, subledgers, financial data models, APIs, and integrations involving both fiat and crypto activities.

• Collaborate with Accounting and Treasury on account and legal entity attribution, controls, reconciliation, exception handling, and record traceability.

• Drive modernization and migration efforts while ensuring the upkeep of close reporting, fund movements, and critical Finance operations.

• Implement testing, documentation, observability, release controls, and incident response practices.

• Work alongside Product, platform engineering, Risk, Security, Compliance, Tax, and Legal on system boundaries, access controls, resilience, regulatory requirements, and auditability.

• Analyze build, buy, and integration options; review designs and communicate decisions, sequencing, risks, and trade-offs.

• Transition key reconciliations from a monthly to a daily cadence.

• Shorten reconciliation-break root-cause analysis from weeks to days.

• Map and validate source tables and transformations that feed into financial statements.

• Complete UAT data lake connections for comprehensive financial data-flow testing.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive software engineering and technical leadership experience, particularly in guiding experienced teams through intricate financial systems or data architecture transformations.

• Proven success in hiring, mentoring, and nurturing specialists while fostering clear ownership, high engineering standards, and effective cross-functional collaborations.

• Profound knowledge of ledgers, subledgers, double-entry accounting principles, reconciliation, settlement, and the journey from operational events to auditable financial records.

• Familiarity with cryptocurrency or digital asset infrastructure, including tracking on-chain activities, internal balances, custody or wallet flows, and traditional financial systems.

• Strong technical acumen in distributed systems, data engineering, APIs, event-driven processing, and integrations across complex platforms.

• Experience in defining a target architecture and executing a transformation roadmap across fragmented or legacy systems while maintaining production reliability.

• Proficiency in designing for data completeness, accuracy, lineage, reconciliation, access control, and auditability.

• Sound judgment in production operations, encompassing incident response, monitoring, debugging, change management, and reliability enhancements.

• Ability to collaborate with senior Finance and Engineering leaders, translating financial, operational, and control needs into a viable engineering roadmap.

• Capability to lead experts and communicate priorities and trade-offs effectively to both executives and technical teams.

• Experience with Rust, TypeScript/Node.js, or Python; familiarity with financial applications such as NetSuite, Kyriba, or BlackLine; and knowledge of SOX or SOC control environments is an advantage.

• Must choose a city and country from the application location options.

• Must indicate whether work sponsorship will be required.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equity program

• Bonus program

• Wellness allowance

• Medical insurance

• Dental insurance

• Vision insurance

• 401(k)