Staff Backend Engineer, Aave App

aavelabs; Madrid; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to build the backend infrastructure behind Aave App, a consumer savings app that makes onchain financial products simple, secure, and intuitive.

The role focuses on the systems between blockchain protocols and consumer experiences, including accounts, wallet services, transaction orchestration, indexing, and APIs for mobile and web clients. You'll own a broad technical area with high ownership and turn ambiguous goals into reliable production systems.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with ownership of complex production systems.
• Strong backend programming skills; Rust is highly desirable, with Go, C++, or Java also acceptable.
• Experience building distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems with reliability and performance requirements.
• Strong knowledge of API/GraphQL design, PostgreSQL or another relational DB, caching, queues, and observability.
• Experience with blockchain systems, particularly transaction signing, key-management flows, wallet infrastructure, and onchain lifecycles.
• Strong judgement around threat modelling, sensitive data, and operational risks of systems handling financial value.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services for Aave App across onboarding, funding, savings, withdrawals, portfolio data, and customer communications.
• Build transaction-orchestration and indexing services that safely prepare, submit, monitor, and reconcile onchain activity across its full lifecycle.
• Integrate with smart contracts, RPC providers, account infrastructure, payment partners, and other external services, designing for degraded dependencies and partial failure.
• Lead technical reviews for high-value systems and improve testing, observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment practices across the backend codebase.
• Work closely with mobile, web, product, design, protocol, security, data, and operations teams to deliver coherent consumer experiences.
• Raise the engineering standard through hands-on delivery, pragmatic architecture, clear documentation, and review that helps other engineers grow.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API/GraphQL design

Security and risk management

Observability

Tools

Rust

Go

C++

Java

PostgreSQL

Caching

Message queues

GraphQL

Kafka

ClickHouse

RPC providers

Job description

About us

Aave Labs began with a simple question: how do we make financial services like borrowing, saving, and earning more accessible globally?

We built the Aave Protocol, now the world’s largest and most trusted onchain lending market, connecting decentralized finance with individuals, traditional finance, and fintech.

Today, we build trusted, high-quality products that expand access to lending, credit, and savings globally

Our culture

We build trusted products that help people access and discover economic opportunities.

We hold a high bar for quality and craftsmanship. No detail is too small. Trust depends on it.

We’re a global team building products people can actually use, turning complex technology into something simple and reliable.

We stay aligned, move quickly, and think long term, while keeping teams lean and focused on impact.

About the Role

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to build the backend infrastructure behind Aave App, a consumer savings app that makes onchain financial products simple, secure, and intuitive.

The role focuses on the systems between blockchain protocols and the consumer experiences built around them. This includes account and wallet services, transaction orchestration, high-reliability blockchain indexing, balances and yield data, funding and withdrawal flows, notifications, and performant, well-documented APIs for mobile and web clients.

You'll own a broad technical area with high ownership and turn ambiguous product goals into reliable production systems. Correctness, security, and operability are critical: the services you built will support customer transactions, sensitive account flows, and financial data across both onchain and offchain infrastructure.

How you can make an impact:

• Design, build, and operate backend services for Aave App across onboarding, funding, savings, withdrawals, portfolio data, and customer communications
• Build transaction-orchestration and indexing services that safely prepare, submit, monitor, and reconcile onchain activity across its full lifecycle
• Integrate with smart contracts, RPC providers, account infrastructure, payment partners, and other external services, designing for degraded dependencies and partial failure
• Lead technical reviews for high-value systems and improve testing, observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment practices across the backend codebase
• Work closely with mobile, web, product, design, protocol, security, data, and operations teams to deliver coherent consumer experiences
• Raise the engineering standard through hands-on delivery, pragmatic architecture, clear documentation, and review that helps other engineers grow

Let's connect if you have:

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of complex production systems
• Strong backend programming skills. Production experience with Rust is highly desirable, but we'll also consider strong systems experience in Go, C++, Java.
• Experience building distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems with clear reliability and performance requirements
• Strong knowledge of API/GraphQL design, PostgreSQL or another relational database, caching, queues, and observability
• Experience with blockchain systems, particularly transaction signing, private-key or key-management flows, wallet infrastructure, and onchain transaction lifecycles, is highly desirable.
• Strong judgement around threat modelling, sensitive data, permissions, and the operational risks of systems handling financial value

Nice to haves:

• Experience with EVM-compatible networks, smart accounts, account abstraction, bridges, or DeFi protocols
• Experience building consumer fintech, savings, wallet, exchange, or payments products at meaningful scale
• Experience with cross-chain indexing, large-scale data ingestion, Kafka, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure

Haven’t quite met all the criteria? Let’s not miss out on the chance to speak. Whilst you might not meet every single requirement, you might bring other, more exciting skills to the companies!

Equal opportunities statement:

Aave Labs celebrates diversity and views each and every team member as a separate individual with their own unique identity. No matter your race, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation or even the wallet you use, we welcome you at Aave Labs. As an equal opportunities employer, we take accountability and believe in everyone's potential to build, create and inspire changes. With a mission to build a diverse workforce, we are proud to foster a working environment in which everyone can feel safe and valued for who they are.