Engineering Manager - Core Services

Engineering Manager - Core Services at Kraken

About the role

As Engineering Manager for Backend Core, you’ll lead a team of 5‑7 engineers, working closely with technical leaders and cross‑functional groups (Engineering, Security, SRE, Leadership) to define and deliver core backend services, including a high‑reliability events platform, gRPC service mesh, and core Rust libraries.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Backend Core team and drive execution of core software projects
• Design and implement Rust libraries and microservices that serve Kraken’s backend stack
• Influence technical direction and design standards for APIs, distributed systems, and foundational libraries
• Champion high‑quality code and system reliability, leveraging AI tools to improve development
• Coordinate cross‑team initiatives to establish API and platform standards across the organization

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering experience
• 2+ years of hands‑on engineering management with a team of 4‑8 people
• Experience writing network services or asynchronous Rust code
• Knowledge of Kafka, stateful stream processing, and materialized views
• Background in distributed systems, backend infrastructure, or core platform engineering
• Working knowledge of gRPC or comparable RPC systems and related API schema design
• Proactive, results‑oriented mindset with strong prioritization skills
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
• Passion for solving complex engineering problems

Nice to have

• Direct experience with Rust in production
• Experience designing or operating event‑driven architectures at scale
• History of software maintenance in open source or company projects

This job is accepting ongoing applications and there is no application deadline.

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.

Kraken is an equal‑opportunity employer. We don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind 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.