Principal Backend Engineer - Push Onramp & Payments

Aave Labs; England; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer in the United Kingdom to lead the engineering team behind Push, a regulated, non-custodial on‑ramp and off‑ramp. You will guide the technical direction for systems connecting banking partners, compliance controls, payments, and blockchain settlement.

You’ll balance product and regulatory requirements with security and reliability, while staying hands-on for architectural steps and critical production issues.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including leadership of production systems and teams.
• Experience designing distributed, event-driven systems handling real money.
• Experience with regulated fintech, payments, or digital assets requiring auditability and high availability.
• Strong backend programming skills; Rust preferred; Go/Java/C++ acceptable as substitutes.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and architecture for Push across backend services and onchain settlement.
• Translate product, regulatory, and operational requirements into a clear engineering roadmap and sound technical decisions.
• Design and build resilient services for on-ramp and off-ramp lifecycles, including settlement and notifications.
• Lead integrations with open-banking, payments, identity, compliance, and blockchain infrastructure providers.
• Set secure boundaries between fiat systems, non-custodial wallets, and onchain execution; manage data, permissions, and signing flows.
• Maintain standards for secure development, architecture reviews, testing, observability, incident response, and on-call ownership.
• Collaborate with Product, Compliance, Legal, Security, Operations, Finance, and application engineers.
• Remain hands-on in codebase for complex architecture and high-risk production changes.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Regulated fintech

Rust

Go/Java/C++

API design

PostgreSQL

Messaging systems

Open-banking / payments

Job description

Aave Labs is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer in the United Kingdom to lead the engineering team behind Push, a regulated, non-custodial on‑ramp and off‑ramp. You will guide the technical direction for systems connecting banking partners, compliance controls, payments, and blockchain settlement.

You’ll balance product and regulatory requirements with security and reliability, while staying hands-on for architectural steps and critical production issues.