Senior Software Engineer - AI Enablement HR

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.

Founded in 2011, Kraken is one of the world's longest-standing crypto platforms, trusted by over 10 million individuals and institutions across the globe. It offers spot trading, margin, futures, staking, and OTC services, with products built for both individual investors and institutional clients. We build the systems that power how employees join, grow, and operate across the company, including hiring, onboarding, learning, and rewards. This is core infrastructure for how the company runs. We’re rebuilding these workflows with AI at the core, designing production systems that take real actions, integrate with critical tools, and are trusted to operate reliably. The focus is turning messy, manual processes into structured, scalable systems. You’ll work closely with cross-functional partners to understand real workflows and translate them into systems that actually work, with high autonomy and direct impact on how AI is built and operated across the company.

You will serve as the primary architect and builder of AI-powered solutions within the Kraken People team. This is a full-stack ownership role spanning opportunity identification, solution design, deployment, governance, and transfer capability back to the People team so they can maintain and extend what you build. You’ll work at the intersection of AI/LLM engineering and HR systems—turning manual, fragmented People processes into autonomous, agentic workflows that serve thousands of Krakenites globally. This is hands-on engineering with direct business impact, not experimentation.

Design and deploy AI-powered HR solutions Architect and build agentic workflows using n8n, Claude API, Python, and MCP that take real actions in HR processes with appropriate human oversight and approval gates. Build multi-agent systems with tool use, function calling, and multi-step reasoning that connect fragmented HR tools (HRIS, ATS, payroll, ticketing) into coherent, end-to-end workflows. Build error handling, audit trails, payroll-calendar awareness, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints into every production system before deployment. Ensure all automations comply with data classification requirements for employee PII, regulated data, and cross-jurisdictional privacy obligations. Own governance and risk for People AI systems Classify all automation builds by risk tier before work begins. No build goes to production without a named Process Owner, documented data flows, and access controls confirmed. Maintain audit logging and documentation for all systems touching regulated employee data or payroll-adjacent workflows. Halt or redesign builds that introduce unacceptable payroll, legal, or data privacy risk. Own that decision and get organizational acceptance before proceeding. Serve as the HRKX domain representative in contributing to governance standards and cross-functional build alignment. Multiply the People team's capability Produce documentation, workflow templates, and runbooks that HRKX professionals can use and maintain without technical support. Train People team members on AI-assisted tools and workflows deployed in production. Drive adoption, not just delivery. Track and report on automation impact: manual hours eliminated, error rates reduced, payroll exceptions avoided, and capacity unlocked for strategic HR work. Act as a force multiplier for the HR KX team, enabling HR professionals to focus on high-value advisory and people judgment work through process, technology, and AI enablement. What