Kraken

• There are a lot of genuinely smart and talented engineers at Kraken.

• Some of the technical problems are interesting, particularly if you enjoy fintech and crypto.

• Individual colleagues were generally great to work with, and I learned a lot from some of them. Sadly most of them were also laid off during my tenure.

I was on my third team within 8 months. That probably summarizes the organizational stability better than anything else I could write. Teams, priorities and responsibilities seemed to change constantly. You can join one team, start building context and relationships, and shortly afterwards find yourself somewhere completely different. It makes all the talk about ownership and long-term impact feel somewhat meaningless when the organization itself keeps moving underneath you. The company expects a lot from engineers. You are expected to take ownership, move quickly, deal with production problems, participate in on-call, care deeply about quality and generally behave as though the success of the product is personally important to you.

Apparently that commitment only goes one way. After putting a huge amount of energy into the job, working on major product initiatives my reward was being laid off. And yes, layoffs happen. Companies restructure. I understand how businesses work. What changed my opinion of Kraken wasn’t simply that I was laid off - it was experiencing just how disposable people can become despite all the messaging around culture, ownership and impact. Career progression also felt unnecessarily slow and bureaucratic. If you’re ambitious and want to grow toward Staff-level responsibility, I wouldn’t assume that doing Staff-like work means you’ll actually be recognized or promoted accordingly.

There was also a frustrating gap between the engineering problems that clearly needed investment and what the organization actually prioritized. It’s difficult to care about engineering excellence when important foundational work repeatedly loses against the next feature or organizational reshuffle. The frustrating part is that Kraken has the ingredients to be an excellent engineering company. There are some seriously good people there and plenty of interesting problems to solve. But talented people don’t compensate for organizational chaos. I joined excited about the company and the opportunity. I left with very little trust in Kraken as an employer. If you’re considering joining, I would ask very direct questions about team stability, recent reorganizations and layoffs, promotion timelines, and how long your prospective manager and team have actually existed in their current form. And I would take the answers with a grain of salt.