Max K.

CTO

Tampa, Florida, United States11 yrs experience

Key Highlights

Led a team of 60 engineers at Kraken.
Founded and sold a $140M staking company.
Reduced trading latency by 75% at Kraken.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech and SaaS expert with extensive leadership experience.

Contact

Skills

Other Skills

CSSJavaMySQLjQueryEntrepreneurshipPHPWeb DevelopmentWordPressHTMLJavaScriptSEOStart-upsHTML 5LinuxDatabases

About

I started my journey in crypto in early 2017 at Kraken as one of it's first engineers. I ended up working at Kraken for 6 years where I became Senior Director of Engineering and led a team of over 60. After leaving Kraken, I started my own company, Orangefin Ventures, which I ultimately sold to SOL Strategies, a publicly traded company, where I currently serve as Chief Technology Officer.

Experience

11 yrs

Total Experience

2 yrs 1 mo

Average Tenure

1 yr 5 mos

Current Experience

Sol strategies inc.

Chief Technology Officer

Dec 2024 – Present · 1 yr 5 mos · Remote

Orangefin ventures

Founder & CEO

Oct 2023 – Dec 2024 · 1 yr 2 mos · Remote

Solo founded Orangefin Ventures, one of the largest staking providers on Solana. Grew to $140M assets under delegation. Sold to Sol Strategies, a publicly traded company, in Dec 2024.

Edgevana inc.

Senior Vice President of Engineering

Oct 2023 – Nov 2024 · 1 yr 1 mo · Remote

Built the company's Solana Mainnet server offering growing it into a $1M+ ARR business. Created edgeSOL, one of Solana's biggest liquid staking tokens with ~$175M in TVL (at time of writing). Led a team of 5.

Kraken digital asset exchange

4 roles

Senior Director of Engineering - Site Reliability & Data Engineering

Promoted

Jan 2021 – Oct 2023 · 2 yrs 9 mos

Led ~60 engineers managing both our infrastructure and data engineering department. Reduced trading latency by 75%, led scaling efforts to support the 10x growth we saw, and lowered cloud costs by 30%. Published a blog about our efforts: https://blog.kraken.com/crypto-education/performance-at-kraken

Director of Engineering - Big Data

Promoted

Feb 2020 – Jan 2021 · 11 mos

Led the 15 person data engineering department and completely rearchitected the stack, moving to a CDC architecture capable of processing around 400K records / second using Debezium, Kafka, Apache Druid, Apache Airflow, Trino, Apache Superset, and Airflow.

Lead Software Engineer

Promoted

Apr 2018 – Feb 2020 · 1 yr 10 mos

Created and formed a brand new finance engineering team, hiring 5 people, and built out a data stack and various services to help support our finance & accounting department.

Software Engineer

Aug 2017 – Apr 2018 · 8 mos

One of the first 15 engineers hired. Worked mostly on the frontend and developer experience, leading migration efforts to React and Docker. Built the company's first CI/CD pipelines and built a tool to test the company's new trading engine.

Sourcetoad, llc

Software Engineer

May 2016 – Aug 2017 · 1 yr 3 mos · Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

One of 3 developers responsible for building Viking Cruise Lines’ flagship app, Viking Voyager: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/viking-voyager/id1244779100?mt=8
Sole developer responsible for refactoring My Viking Story: https://www.vikingrivercruises.com/why-viking/community/my-viking-story.html

Focus school software

Software Engineer

May 2015 – May 2016 · 1 yr · Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

Full stack developer for leading student information system (SIS) using Linux, Postgres, PHP, and Nginx.
Lead engineer for nine districts moving to SAML SSO authentication.
Built custom California transcript to comply with all California rules & regulations.