Founding DevRel Lead

About the Role

Payward, the company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services, and CF Benchmarks, has spent the last 15 years building a modern, globally accessible financial infrastructure platform designed to support an open financial system. This opening is with Payward Services in the United Arab Emirates.

This is a newly created leadership role for the person who will help establish a Developer & Agent Interface capability from scratch. The focus is on making Payward the preferred platform for developers and AI agents building financial services products.

The role sits where Engineering, Product, and Growth meet. You will help shape how developers discover the platform, how agents retrieve and use services, and how new infrastructure products are introduced to market.

This is not a standard developer relations position. There is no mature playbook, existing team, or pre-built operating model to inherit. Instead, you will help define the function, the standards, and the long-term direction of the organization.

You will work closely with teams building APIs, SDKs, wallets, payment infrastructure, and agent-facing products. Beyond documentation, you will help influence the products themselves, set expectations for developer experience, guide launch strategy, and build technical storytelling and ecosystem engagement.

The goal is to make Payward the infrastructure choice that an AI agent selects when a developer needs trading, payments, wallets, or broader financial services.

Responsibilities

• Lead developer activation across APIs, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, wallets, and new agent-oriented interfaces.
• Track and improve adoption indicators such as API usage, SDK installations, production integrations, GitHub activity, and agent retrievals.
• Create quickstarts, reference builds, SDKs, CLIs, MCP servers, and other tooling that reduce integration friction.
• Work with Product and Engineering so launches are ready for developers and compatible with agent workflows from day one.
• Define how developers and AI agents discover, interpret, and interact with Payward’s infrastructure.
• Develop launch messaging, technical narratives, demos, and documentation that position Payward as a leading developer platform.
• Deliver keynotes, live demonstrations, and technical talks at conferences and industry events.
• Advocate for developers internally by identifying pain points, sharing ecosystem needs, and influencing product decisions.
• Help shape the operating model, culture, and long-term foundation of the future Developer & Agent Interface team.

Requirements

• Experience building and scaling developer adoption at a leading developer platform company such as Stripe, Vercel, Cloudflare, Anthropic, GitHub, OpenAI, Twilio, Stainless, or a similar environment.
• Strong technical fluency, including the ability to read OpenAPI specifications, write or review code, evaluate integrations, and work with engineers as a peer.
• A demonstrated history of driving measurable adoption outcomes rather than only awareness or engagement.
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to write launch content, present on stage, build demos, and explain complex products clearly.
• A builder mindset with a strong preference for shipping, testing, and iterating.
• Solid understanding of modern developer ecosystems and how they operate.
• Experience with the agent era, including MCP servers, agent tooling, structured retrieval, or AI-native developer experiences, plus an understanding of when retrieval is more effective than SEO.
• Hands-on collaboration with engineering and product teams to improve the developer experience itself, not only the messaging around it.
• Preferred background: early-stage developer platform creation rather than joining a mature DevRel function.
• Helpful domain knowledge in wallets, identity, authentication, and agent-native transaction flows.

Eligibility

This role is open to candidates who can bring the technical credibility, product intuition, and developer-platform experience needed to create a new function from the ground up. The employer encourages applicants who do not meet every listed requirement but are strongly interested in crypto and the problem space.

Additional Information

If no application deadline is mentioned, applications remain open on an ongoing basis.

Candidates may remove personal details such as age, date of birth, and attendance or graduation dates from their resume.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered in a manner consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Payward says it values people from diverse backgrounds and makes hiring decisions based on merit, skills, knowledge, and ability. The company also notes that it may use job-related skills or work-style assessments during hiring, with results considered alongside interviews and experience rather than used alone.

Equal opportunity is part of the company’s hiring approach, and discrimination or harassment is not tolerated on the basis of race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.

The posting also invites readers to stay connected through the company’s social channels and blog, and includes a candidate privacy notice.

About Payward

Payward Services is an enterprise infrastructure platform that helps companies connect trading, payments, funding, and digital asset services through one unified system. Its infrastructure combines liquidity, custody, compliance, risk management, and settlement to lower operational complexity for fintechs, banks, brokerages, and payment providers.

The company is building APIs, wallets, payment capabilities, developer tools, and agent-native interfaces intended to support the next generation of financial applications.

What This Role Is Building Toward

You will be helping create a long-term capability that makes Payward easier for developers and AI agents to discover and use. The expectation is that this function will grow into the leadership nucleus of an organization built around developer and agent interfaces.

Note

The original posting also included social and brand references such as Twitter, the Kraken Blog, LinkedIn, and a candidate privacy notice. These are retained here only as context and not as application instructions.