Sr Product Manager - Virality, Referrals & KOL

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.

The team

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.

Consumer Growth builds mobile and web experiences that help people become Kraken customers, fund their accounts, invest, earn, access new products, build wealth and stay lifelong clients. Product, engineering, design, data, and lifecycle marketing build together.

The opportunity

• Own growth in viral, KOL- and creator-referred new transacting users (NTUs). Set aggressive NTU targets backed by a credible growth model, then beat them. Build and scale sharing, referral, and creator systems that drive 10x, then 50x growth while hitting payback targets.

• Build sharing people find useful. Create natural reasons to pass on product value, and referral programs with modeled payback incentives, and without relying on aggressive incentives to hit targets. Make both work for the sender, recipient, and business.

• Own the audience-to-customer journey. Build and test paths from recommendations and creator audiences to product value and a first transaction. Partner with the teams that own onboarding and core product experiences on shared journeys.

• Own Consumer features and updates for the KOL Platform. Set the Consumer roadmap, ship features and ongoing improvements, and make measurement and commercial tools trustworthy and easy to use. Work with the teams that own KOL and affiliate relationships.

• Build creator tools across Kraken’s app and web. Help creators, key opinion leaders (KOLs), and power referrers invite their followers and turn their audiences into valuable new transacting customers. Understand their different motivations and build with core product teams.

• Make acquisition economics work. Own acquisition cost and gross-margin payback against clear targets, including fully loaded incentive, partner, operating, and fraud costs. Use downstream retention and revenue to judge what deserves more investment.

• Increase virality per new transacting user and per returning user. Test ways to improve send conversion, invites per sender, and invite-to-first-transaction conversion. Improve repeat sharing and loop speed, and prove the gains create incremental valuable new transacting customers.

• Build measurement you can trust. Validate instrumentation, define hypotheses and guardrails, and run tests that can detect meaningful effects. Separate attributed activity from incremental growth, interpret uncertainty honestly, and check that gains persist as you scale.

What you bring

• You’ve personally built a product, tool, feature, or experience that spread beyond its initial audience. You can explain why it spread, your contribution, and how it acquired valuable customers.

• Repeated success beating acquisition targets through referrals, product virality, or creator-led growth. Show the baseline, target, result, timeframe, component rates you improved, and your personal contribution. Bring evidence the gains lasted.

• Strong growth product sense. You understand sharing psychology and the different motivations of customers, creators, KOLs, and power referrers. You combine customer research, creative product instincts, and strong UX and copy to give people a reason to participate.

• Analytical independence. You independently investigate behavior with SQL and product analytics, validate instrumentation, and build funnel, cohort, and growth models.

• Experimentation and commercial judgment. You design reliable tests, interpret uncertainty honestly, and distinguish attribution from incremental growth. You understand acquisition cost and payback, including downstream retention, revenue, and fully loaded incentive and fraud costs.

• Senior ownership and hands-on execution. You set strategy, make hard priority calls, align teams without relying on reporting lines, and deliver autonomously. You use AI and working prototypes to turn original ideas into experiences people can try.

Nice to haves

• Experience building self-service creator or affiliate tools, revenue-share systems, or reliable partner payouts.

• Consumer fintech, crypto, payments, or experience designing financial promotions and fraud controls.

• Experience adapting growth journeys across markets, cultures, and regulatory environments.

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.

Our commitment

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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