Lead Backend Engineer, Fintech On/Off‑Ramp Platform

Aave Labs; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the Push backend and related systems. You will shape the technical direction across payment initiation, on-ramp/off-ramp, identity, and compliance integrations, while ensuring security and regulatory compliance.

This hands-on leadership role requires deep system design, delivery excellence, and mentoring a high-performing engineering team. You will collaborate with Product, Legal, Security, and Operations to translate requirements into

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience with senior technical leadership
• Experience designing distributed, event-driven systems handling real value
• Experience in regulated fintech, payments, or digital assets with auditability and high availability
• Strong backend programming skills; Rust preferred; Go/Java/C++ acceptable

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction and architecture for Push and related backend services
• Translate regulatory and product requirements into an engineering roadmap
• Design and build resilient onramps/offramps, payment initiation, settlement, and notifications
• Lead integrations with open-banking, payments, identity, compliance, and blockchain providers
• Maintain secure development practices, architecture reviews, testing, observability, and on-call ownership
• Collaborate with Product, Compliance, Legal, Security, Operations, and engineers
• Remain hands-on in the codebase for complex, high-risk changes

Skills

Backend architecture

Leadership

Distributed systems

Rust

Go/Java/C++ expertise

PostgreSQL

APIs design

Security & compliance

Tools

Kafka

Open banking integrations

Blockchain infra

Job description

Aave Labs is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the Push backend and related systems. You will shape the technical direction across payment initiation, on-ramp/off-ramp, identity, and compliance integrations, while ensuring security and regulatory compliance.

This hands-on leadership role requires deep system design, delivery excellence, and mentoring a high-performing engineering team. You will collaborate with Product, Legal, Security, and Operations to translate requirements into