About the Position

Data Platform Engineering Manager

Kraken is a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values, aiming to accelerate the global adoption of crypto for financial freedom and inclusion. The Data Platform team builds real-time infrastructure powering decision-making across one of the world's largest digital asset exchanges, processing billions of events daily across trading, compliance, and product systems.

Responsibilities

Lead and grow a team of senior data platform engineers building Kraken's real-time streaming infrastructure
Own the architecture and roadmap for high-volume low-frequency data systems, focusing on data stack like Spark, Kafka, Iceberg, RisingWave, Apache Flink
Design and operate scalable data architecture serving trading, risk, compliance, analytics, and product teams
Drive adoption of AI automation and intelligent workflows including data quality checks, pipeline orchestration, anomaly detection, and self-healing infrastructure
Partner with ML/AI, analytics, and product engineering teams to deliver platform capabilities
Evolve Kraken's data-lake and warehouse architecture to support batch and streaming workloads
Set technical direction balancing reliability, velocity, and cost efficiency at scale
Hire, mentor, and retain top-tier platform engineers; build a culture of ownership and technical excellence

Requirements

8+ years in data engineering, platform engineering, or distributed systems with at least 3 years managing engineering teams
Experience building data-lakes in AWS (Spark, Athena, Iceberg, Parquet, Presto), including data modeling, data quality best practices, and self-service tooling
Strong expertise in building and operating real-time data at scale including Kafka, Spark Streaming, Debezium, and CDC pipelines
Proven ability to manage competing priorities across multiple stakeholder groups
Strong communication skills for technical and non-specialist audiences
Experience designing or adopting AI/ML-powered automation in data workflows including pipeline orchestration, intelligent monitoring, automated remediation, or LLM-integrated tooling
Proficiency in Python, Scala, or Java in a production data platform context
Solid understanding of cloud-native data infrastructure (AWS Glue, Athena, S3, EMR, Lambda, or equivalents)
Track record of managing, recruiting, and developing high-performing remote engineering teams
Ability to translate long-term platform vision into executable quarterly roadmaps
Servant-leadership style coaching and growing engineers

Nice to Have

Experience with RisingWave and/or Clickhouse in production or evaluation
Familiarity with LLM-based agents or AI workflow frameworks (e.g. LangChain, LangGraph, custom orchestration)
Background in cryptocurrency, trading systems, or high-throughput financial data
Experience building self-service data platform tooling for internal engineering consumers
Contributions to open-source streaming or data infrastructure projects

We Offer

Competitive salary
Opportunity to work in a mission-focused company rooted in crypto values
Work with one of the world's largest digital asset exchanges

About the Company

Additional Information

Applicants may redact or remove information identifying age, date of birth, or educational attendance/graduation dates on their resumes. Kraken considers qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Kraken is an equal opportunity employer and does not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on protected characteristics as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

Data Platform Engineering Manager

Job description