Staff Backend Engineer, Vaults

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

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 work with a small and highly technical team building the infrastructure behind new DeFi protocols and vault products at Aave Labs.

The role focuses on the systems between onchain protocols and the applications built around them. This includes vault management and curation systems, constraint-based allocation solvers, secure protocol infrastructure, high-throughput blockchain indexing, and performant, well-documented APIs.

You'll work on systems where correctness, reliability, performance, and security directly affect user funds and protocol integrity. The role has significant ownership and autonomy across offchain infrastructure and components that interact closely with smart contracts and onchain state.

You will also work closely with Quant Engineers. Quant owns the financial models, assumptions, validation, and calibration. Backend owns the production systems, data pipelines, and services that run those models. Smart contract engineers own their onchain integration and enforcement.

How you can make an impact:

• 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

Let's connect if you have:

• 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

Nice to haves:

• Experience with cross-chain blockchain indexing or large-scale data ingestion
• Experience designing constraint, optimization, solver, or allocation systems
• Experience reading smart contracts and integrating with EVM-based protocols
• Experience operating financial systems where correctness and reliability affect capital
• Hands-on experience with Kafka and ClickHouse or similar analytical databases

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.