Senior Software Engineer, Technical Leadership / Platform

Cyclops; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company issued laptop

Technology Accessories

Annual In-Person Full-Team Meetup

Job summary

Cyclops is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to own backend architecture and lead platform evolution for a crypto payments infrastructure. The role combines hands-on coding in TypeScript/Node.js with significant architectural responsibilities and partner integrations.

You will drive reliability, observability, and scalable design while mentoring peers and shaping cross-team practices in a fully remote, international setting.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional backend development experience.
• Deep hands-on crypto infrastructure experience: custody, wallets, exchange, or settlement systems.
• Strong backend expertise in TypeScript and Node.js.
• Extensive distributed system design experience with microservices and REST APIs.
• Production incident handling, debugging, and data issue resolution.
• End-to-end ownership from design to production support.
• Excellent PostgreSQL skills and familiarity with other storage types.
• Proficient with AI coding tools and reviewing AI-generated code.
• Mentor-level collaboration and effective technical communication in English.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve core platform services with reliability and data integrity.
• Identify scalability risks and plan pragmatic migrations.
• Lead technical reviews with partners, document decisions and timelines.
• Improve reliability with retries, timeouts, idempotency, and fallbacks.
• Enhance observability and participate in incident analysis.
• Contribute to discovery with PoCs and third-party API analysis.
• Implement complex backend components in TypeScript/Node.js under partial failure.
• Elevate team maturity through thoughtful code reviews and knowledge sharing.

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

Distributed systems

Backend architecture

Crypto infrastructure

SQL PostgreSQL

Observability

AI coding tools

Mentoring

Tools

Kafka

RabbitMQ

SQS

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

Job description

Role Overview

This is a Senior Software Engineer role with a Technical Leadership / Platform specialization, focused on system design, reliability, and long-term platform evolution. You will help the team understand how our systems should behave under load, during failures, and as they scale, ensuring the platform foundation remains healthy over time.

The role involves a significant architectural focus (30-50%) while remaining fully hands-on: you take ownership of the most complex or high-risk backend work, and act as the technical representative for API/SDK integrations with third-party vendors and clients, during and after the integration.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and evolve core platform services, focusing on reliability, data integrity, and clear service boundaries aligned with business requirements
• Identify architectural risks, scalability limits, and weak points before they become production issues; recognize when existing tools (queues, storage, frameworks) reach their limits and propose pragmatic, incremental improvement or migration paths
• Own the technical relationship with partners as the primary technical point of contact: lead solution reviews, troubleshooting, and roadmap alignment; document technical decisions and integration details; ensure partners understand expectations, timelines, and constraints
• Design and improve reliability mechanisms: retries and backoff, timeouts and idempotency, handling of partial failures, degraded and fallback modes
• Drive improvements in observability (metrics, logs, tracing, operational visibility) and participate in production incident analysis
• Contribute during the Discovery stage of projects: build PoCs, validate ideas, analyze third-party vendor APIs and proposed integration flows
• Implement the most complex and high-risk backend components using TypeScript and Node.js, owning correctness under partial failure scenarios
• Raise the overall technical maturity of the team, including senior engineers: thoughtful code reviews, decomposition of large or ambiguous problems, knowledge sharing through pairing and documentation

Required Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional backend development experience
• Deep hands-on experience building and operating crypto infrastructure: custody, wallets, exchange, payment, or settlement systems. You have designed and run production systems that move real funds. Integrating a crypto API into an existing product, or building UI on top of one, does not meet this bar
• Strong backend expertise in TypeScript and Node.js
• Deep experience in distributed system design: microservices architecture, service boundaries and data models, REST APIs and API contracts, queues and asynchronous communication
• Hands-on production experience: incident response, debugging, API failures, data issues
• Experience owning services end-to-end, from design to production support
• Excellent knowledge of SQL (PostgreSQL) and understanding of other storage types
• Strong reliability mindset and experience with failure scenarios; experience improving observability and investigating production incidents
• Proficient daily use of AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot), with the ability to review AI-generated code quickly and critically
• Ability to mentor engineers, including senior-level, and to evaluate trade-offs and propose practical solutions
• High agency: you treat problems in your scope as yours by default, act before being asked, and elevate with a proposed plan when a decision is above your level
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to bridge technical and business conversations; strong written and verbal English

Preferred Experience

• Experience leading architecture work across timezones in a distributed team
• Experience in regulated financial environments (licensing, audits, compliance-driven engineering requirements)
• Experience with queues and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.)
• Redis or other in-memory data stores
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS (user-level understanding)
• Experience shaping team practices around AI-assisted development

Reporting Structure

Reports to the Engineering Manager. This role does not include direct people management, only technical influence.

Why This Role

• Own the technical foundation of a crypto payment platform being built now: architecture decisions you make will define the platform for years
• Full technical ownership of the highest-risk, highest-impact work in the company, with direct influence on how the whole engineering organization builds
• AI-first engineering culture where your leverage multiplies through the team

Location

Remote. USA, Argentina, or Brazil. The role works US business hours (Eastern Time). A minimum of 4 hours of daily overlap with Central European working hours is a requirement.

Compensation and Benefits

As an independent contractor, you'll enjoy the flexibility to determine how and when you deliver your work, while partnering closely with our team to meet agreed milestones and business objectives. Compensation and engagement terms will be outlined in your contractor agreement.

Additional Benefits

• Company issued laptop
• Technology Accessories
• Annual In-Person Full-Team Meetup

About Cyclops

Cyclops is the first stablecoin and crypto infrastructure platform built exclusively for the payments industry. With low and no code solutions, Cyclops is the fastest way for payments companies to bring crypto and stablecoin offerings to market. Founded by crypto and payments industry veterans who built crypto solutions for Shift4, Cyclops enables crypto acceptance, stablecoin settlement and stablecoin payouts for payments companies. Cyclops has raised a seed round and, more recently, a $20M Series A to accelerate the growth of the most complete stablecoin platform. We move fast, we think rigorously, and hold ourselves to the highest standard in the industry.

Cyclops Culture

Don’t join Cyclops if you’re looking for a typical 9-5. The culture we’ve built is one of first-principles thinking and relentless execution. We wake up every day excited to deliver great products worthy of the world’s best companies. Everyone who works at Cyclops must have a founder mindset, where no problem is too big to solve.