Founding DevRel Lead

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.

Payward Services is an enterprise infrastructure platform that enables companies to seamlessly integrate trading, payments, funding, and digital asset services through a single unified system. It provides coordinated liquidity, custody, compliance, risk management, and settlement capabilities, reducing operational complexity for fintechs, banks, brokerages, and payment providers.

Payward has world-class engineering, products, infrastructure, and regulatory assets. We’re building APIs, wallets, payment capabilities, developer tooling, and agent-native interfaces that can power the next generation of financial applications.

What we don’t yet have is the function responsible for making Payward the default choice for developers and AI agents building in financial services.

We’re looking for the founding leader of that effort.

This role sits at the intersection of Engineering, Product and Growth. Your job will be to help create a new Developer & Agent Interface capability from the ground up - defining how developers discover our platform, how agents retrieve and interact with our services, and how we bring new infrastructure products to market.

This isn’t a traditional DevRel role.

You won’t inherit a mature playbook, established team, or existing motion. You’ll help create them.

You’ll partner closely with engineering teams building APIs, SDKs, wallets, payments infrastructure, and agent-facing products. You’ll help shape the products themselves, not just the documentation around them. You’ll establish the standards for developer experience, launch strategy, technical storytelling, and ecosystem engagement.

Our mission is simple: Make Payward the default infrastructure an AI agent selects when a developer asks for trading, payments, wallets, or financial services.

We’re looking for someone who wants to help build that capability for the long term - and who can grow into the leader of the organization that emerges from it.

• Own developer activation end-to-end across APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, wallets, and emerging agent interfaces

• Drive adoption metrics that matter: API usage, SDK installs, production integrations, GitHub engagement, and agent retrievals

• Build quickstarts, reference implementations, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, and developer tooling that make Payward easy to integrate with

• Partner directly with Product and Engineering to ensure every launch is developer-ready and agent-friendly on day one

• Help define how developers and AI agents discover, understand, and interact with Payward infrastructure

• Create technical narratives, launch content, demos, and documentation that establish Payward as a leading developer platform

• Carry keynotes, live demos, and technical presentations at industry events and developer conferences

• Represent developers internally by identifying friction, surfacing ecosystem needs, and influencing product direction

• Help build the long-term DNA, processes, and culture of a world-class Developer & Agent Interface organization

• Built and scaled developer adoption at a top-tier developer platform company such as Stripe, Vercel, Cloudflare, Anthropic, GitHub, OpenAI, Twilio, Stainless, or equivalent

• Strong technical credibility - you can read OpenAPI specifications, ship code, review integrations, and engage engineers as a peer

• Proven track record of owning measurable adoption outcomes, not just awareness or engagement metrics

• Exceptional storyteller capable of writing launch posts, delivering keynotes, creating demos, and making complex products feel intuitive

• Builder mentality with a bias toward shipping and experimentation

• Deep understanding of modern developer ecosystems and workflows

• Agent-era literacy - you’ve worked with MCP servers, agent tooling, structured retrieval, or AI-native developer experiences and understand where retrieval beats SEO

• Experience working closely with engineering and product teams to shape the developer experience itself, not just the messaging around it

• Experience building developer platforms from an early stage rather than joining an already mature DevRel organization

• Understanding of wallets, identity, authentication, and agent-native transaction flows

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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