Staff Backend Engineer

Cari LLC; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity

Full benefits

401(k) matching

Flexible PTO

Remote-first environment

Job summary

Cari Network is seeking a senior backend platform engineer to set the technical direction for cross-cutting infrastructure used by Banking and Blockchain teams. You will define durable workflow patterns, transaction ordering rules, and shared APIs that unify multiple services across the platform.

You will scale reliability, design reusable platform components, and drive cross-team alignment without formal authority.

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in durable workflow/orchestration systems, distributed transaction ordering, or data-consistency guarantees.
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript; Experience with Effect.ts or similar.
• Experience designing systems that other teams build on top of.
• Track record of cross-team technical alignment without formal authority.
• Strong reliability instincts: idempotency, at-least-once delivery, crash recovery.
• Ability to name architectural risk early.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for cross-cutting backend platform infrastructure: durable workflow orchestration, transaction-ordering, and shared primitives.
• Design systems that span multiple services, including data flow, live-system migrations, and API versioning.
• Establish reliability standards across services: load testing, deployment gates, and failure-mode analysis.
• Increase team impact by building tooling, templates, and standards used org-wide.
• Align multiple engineering teams on shared direction and build consensus.
• Represent backend platform engineering in cross-org planning and flag risks early.

Job description

About Cari

The Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system powering real-time, 24/7 movement of digital money across the traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. A pre-launch startup, we’re creating an entirely new category of financial infrastructure that brings cash on chain through tokenization while powering the full spectrum of payments for our network — banks and most importantly, the customers they serve.

About the Role

You'll set technical direction for the platform infrastructure that our Banking and Blockchain engineering teams both build on—durable workflow orchestration, transaction-ordering guarantees, and the shared architectural patterns that keep two fast-moving product teams from quietly reinventing the same infrastructure twice. This is a cross-team role: your decisions constrain and enable how both teams design their own services.

You'll have deep expertise in at least one area the org draws on—most likely distributed transaction ordering, durable workflow systems, or data-consistency guarantees for financial flows—and you'll be the person other senior and staff engineers upscale to when a cross-service design question doesn't have an obvious owner.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction for cross-cutting backend platform infrastructure: durable workflow orchestration (Restate), transaction-ordering and concurrency-control patterns, and the shared primitives Banking and Blockchain services build on

• Design systems that span multiple services—data flow across the platform, migration strategies for live systems, and versioning strategy for shared infrastructure APIs

• Establish reliability standards that apply across services, not just your own: load testing profiles, deployment safety gates, and the failure-mode analysis that should happen before launch, not after

• Multiply the team's impact through systems, not just review: build the tooling, templates, and enforced standards (shared CI patterns, reusable service scaffolding, common observability conventions) that reduce process overhead org-wide

• Align multiple engineering teams on shared technical direction—this means building consensus, not just publishing a decision

• Represent backend platform engineering in cross-org technical planning, and flag architectural risk before it becomes another team's incident

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of backend software engineering experience, including a track record of setting technical direction across multiple services or teams, not just owning your own

• Deep expertise in at least one of: durable workflow/orchestration systems, distributed transaction ordering, or data-consistency guarantees in financial or otherwise correctness-critical systems

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript; production experience with Effect (effect.ts) or a comparable functional effect system strongly preferred

• Experience designing systems that other teams build on top of—you understand what makes a shared platform component genuinely reusable versus just reused

• Track record of driving cross-team technical alignment without formal authority over the teams you're aligning

• Strong instincts around financial-grade reliability: idempotency, at-least-once delivery, crash recovery, and reconciliation, at a scale spanning multiple services

• Comfortable identifying and naming architectural risk before it's anyone's incident

Nice to Haves

• Prior work in fintech, payments, or another regulated financial infrastructure environment, ideally at meaningful transaction scale

• Experience with blockchain or custody-adjacent transaction systems

• Track record of building internal platform tooling or standards adopted org-wide

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary, bonus, and equity

• Full medical, vision, dental benefits

• 401(k) with company matching

• Flexible PTO in a remote-first environment

• Opportunity to shape a market-defining protocol with an experienced founding team

Security Responsibilities

Applies to all Cari employees

• Comply with all Cari information security policies, including the Acceptable Use Policy, and complete required security awareness training.

• Protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Cari systems and data, including bank-partner and customer information, consistent with least-privilege access principles.