Software Engineer II - Frontend - Pro

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

The Pro team owns Kraken's flagship trading web application - a high-performance, real-time React app that serves multiple product surfaces from a single web codebase: Spot trading, Margin, Futures, Equities, Earn, and many more. The application receives a heavy stream of live updates (order books, tickers, balances, positions, fills) and must remain responsive and stable under sustained load. The team is globally distributed, codes in TypeScript and React, and is responsible for shipping features, defending performance, stability, and keeping the production application observable through Sentry, Mixpanel and structured logging.

The opportunity

• •Leverage LLM's to accelerate development while still producing production-ready code.

• •Leverage LLM's to build agentic flows to automate tasks and improve productivity.

• •Design, develop and maintain features in a large, multi-product React web application used by professional traders globally.

• •Own performance end to end: profile, measure and optimise real-time UI updates (tables, order books, charts, order forms) so the app stays responsive under heavy WebSocket throughput.

• •Build and evolve the WebSocket and Web Worker layer that powers live market data, balances, positions and order updates across the app.

• •Set the standard for high-quality code through reviews, mentorship and constructive feedback to engineers across the team.

• •Contribute to technical strategy: architecture, data flow, state management, component design and shared libraries used across the trading surfaces.

• •Safeguard performance improvements with regression-resistant patterns, instrumentation, dashboards and alerts, so wins do not silently erode over time.

• •Own observability for the features you ship: meaningful Sentry instrumentation, Mixpanel events, structured logs and actionable alerts.

• •Write integration and component tests.

• •Drive process improvements (engineering practices, tooling, build pipeline, AI-assisted workflows) and lead by example.

What You Bring

• •4+ years of experience in software development, with a focus on production web applications.

• •Deep understanding of JavaScript/TypeScript and strong proficiency with the modern React ecosystem.

• •Experience building real-time UIs with WebSockets and Web Workers.

• •Strong React and JavaScript performance skills.

• •Experience working with LLM coding tools (Cursor, Claude, Copilot or similar) to accelerate development while still producing production-ready code.

• •Hands-on experience with React Query or similar.

• •Practical experience with production user monitoring and observability.

• •Experience with frontend testing at multiple levels.

• •Comfortable with feature flagging and progressive rollouts.

• •Familiarity with modern frontend build pipelines and tooling (rsbuild/webpack/SWC, monorepos, TypeScript project references, ESLint, Prettier, Husky).

• •Strong understanding of UI/UX best practices and design-system driven development.

• •Experience within a large technology organization or fast-growing startup.

• •Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

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.

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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