Staff Backend Engineer: DeFi Infrastructure & Rust

Arbitrum; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join a small, highly technical team building the infrastructure behind new DeFi protocols and vault products. The role centers on offchain systems that interact with onchain state, involving vault management, data ingestion, and scalable APIs.

You will collaborate with Quant Engineers and smart contract engineers to deliver reliable, secure production services with strong ownership and autonomy across infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 5-8+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of production systems.
• Strong experience with Rust. Experience with C++, Go, Zig, or another systems language can substitute
• Experience building high-performance, data-intensive, or event-driven backend systems
• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge
• Experience with blockchain, DeFi, financial infrastructure, or another environment involving real capital
• The ability to work independently in a high-autonomy environment
• Strong judgment around correctness, reliability, and security

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend infrastructure for new DeFi protocols and vault products
• Build vault management, curation, and constraint-based allocation systems
• Build high-throughput blockchain indexers and data-ingestion pipelines
• Design performant, stable, and well-documented APIs for applications and internal systems
• Work with Quant Engineers to turn reviewed models into reliable production services
• Work closely with smart contract engineers on systems that consume onchain state and submit onchain transactions
• Take technical ownership of projects and help maintain a high engineering standard across the team

Skills

Backend engineering

Rust

PostgreSQL

Blockchain/DeFi

Independent work

Reliability & security

Tools

Kafka

ClickHouse

Job description

Aave Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join a small, highly technical team building the infrastructure behind new DeFi protocols and vault products. The role centers on offchain systems that interact with onchain state, involving vault management, data ingestion, and scalable APIs.

You will collaborate with Quant Engineers and smart contract engineers to deliver reliable, secure production services with strong ownership and autonomy across infrastructure.