Affiliate Lead - Consumer

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.

Kraken's Consumer Growth team is responsible for acquiring and growing high-quality customers globally across Kraken and Krak. We are looking for an experienced affiliate operator to own and scale our existing affiliate programme and build the Consumer KOL and creator strategy. This is a senior individual-contributor role with significant autonomy. You will set the global affiliate and KOL strategy, directly own affiliate and KOL execution in North America, and work closely with regional KOL and affiliate colleagues across LATAM, Europe and APAC as this distributed team grows over time. You will decide which affiliate and KOL partners to recruit, scale, improve or exit; determine how channel budgets are allocated across partners; and personally lead our most important partner relationships. Success means incremental funded customers who retain and create long-term value, achieving our payback targets — not more links, clicks or low-cost sign-ups. This is a senior individual-contributor role with significant autonomy. You will set channel direction, make portfolio and investment decisions, and remain hands-on with strategic partners. Success means incremental funded customers who retain and create long-term value—not more links, clicks or low-cost sign-ups.

Own and scale the global affiliate programme across Kraken and Krak. Set strategy, partner and market priorities, and investment allocation against funded customers, retained revenue, LTV, CAC, ROI and fully loaded payback. Include all affiliate and KOL costs—retainers, CPA, revenue share, flat fees, incentives, and attributable production or activation costs—in those decisions. Build direct relationships with valuable affiliates, publishers, comparison sites, communities, creators and KOLs; use networks and agencies selectively, not as a substitute for partner craft. Segment the portfolio by audience, model, market and customer quality. Design and negotiate CPA, revenue share, hybrid or quality-weighted terms that align incentives with sustainable value. Remain hands-on with strategic partners through evaluation, onboarding, offers, content, landing experience, verification, funding, first use and retention. Diagnose where performance is gained or lost. Work with Data to create partner-level cohort views and tests that separate last-click attribution from incremental growth. Bring clear hypotheses and context; do not wait for analysts to frame the business question. Decide which partners to scale, improve, cap or exit based on downstream economics and customer experience—not top-of-funnel volume alone. Protect the channel from brand bidding, coupon interception, promotional abuse, fraud and low-quality traffic, working with Compliance and other partners on practical controls and escalation paths. Build the Consumer KOL and creator strategy, personally recruiting, activating and scaling high-potential KOLs and creators. Set objectives, briefs, commercial models and measurement suited to each partnership; do not force every creator into a performance-affiliate model. Adapt strategy to local customer motivations, barriers, language, regulation and channel ecosystems. Build repeatable workflows with Performance Marketing, Product, Creative and regional teams, using AI to improve sourcing, analysis, content operations and monitoring while retaining human judgement and compliance review. What You Bring Required A track record of owning and scaling an affiliate programme as a hands-on operator, with clear