Staff Backend Engineer, Aave App Vaults

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Aave Labs is seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to own core backend infrastructure for the Aave App and vault products. You will shape systems connecting blockchain protocols with consumer experiences, focusing on reliability, security, and operability across onchain and offchain layers.

Collaborate with Quant, smart contract, and platform teams to deliver scalable APIs, data pipelines, and high-throughput services for wallets, accounts, and funding flows.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering with ownership of production systems.
• Strong backend programming skills; Rust is highly desirable.
• Experience with distributed, data-intensive or event-driven systems.
• Knowledge of API/GraphQL design and relational databases like PostgreSQL.
• Experience with blockchain or financial infrastructure is a plus.
• Good judgement on threat modelling and operational risk.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services across onboarding, funding, savings, vaults, and data pipelines.
• Develop vault management, monitoring, and rebalancing with partner vaults.
• Create transaction orchestration and high-throughput onchain indexing services.
• Integrate with smart contracts and external providers, handling degraded dependencies.
• Lead technical reviews and improve testing, observability, and deployment practices.
• Collaborate with mobile, web, product, design, protocol, security, data, and ops teams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Rust

Go

C++

Zig

Java

API design

GraphQL

PostgreSQL

Observability

Tools

PostgreSQL

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 build the backend infrastructure behind Aave App, a consumer savings app that makes onchain financial products simple, secure, and intuitive, and the vault products that power it.

The role focuses on the systems between blockchain protocols and the consumer experiences built around them. This includes account and wallet services, transaction orchestration, vault management, monitoring and rebalancing, partner vault integrations, high-reliability blockchain indexing, balances and yield data, funding and withdrawal flows, notifications, and performant, well-documented APIs for mobile and web clients.

You'll own a broad technical area with high ownership and turn ambiguous product goals into reliable production systems. Correctness, security, and operability are critical: the services you build will support customer transactions, sensitive account flows, user funds, and financial data across both onchain and offchain infrastructure.

You'll also work closely with Quant Engineers, who own the financial models, assumptions, and calibration behind vault allocation and rebalancing, and with smart contract engineers, who own onchain integration and enforcement. Backend owns the production systems, data pipelines, and services that run those models.

How you can make an impact:

• - Design, build, and operate backend services for Aave App across onboarding, funding, savings, vaults, withdrawals, portfolio data, and customer communications
• - Build vault management, monitoring, and rebalancing systems, including partner vault integrations, and work with Quant Engineers to turn reviewed allocation models into reliable production services
• - Build transaction-orchestration and high-throughput indexing services that safely prepare, submit, monitor, and reconcile onchain activity across its full lifecycle
• - Integrate with smart contracts, RPC providers, account infrastructure, payment partners, and other external services, designing for degraded dependencies and partial failure
• - Lead technical reviews for high-value systems and improve testing, observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment practices across the backend codebase
• - Work closely with mobile, web, product, design, protocol, smart contract, quant, security, data, and operations teams to deliver coherent consumer experiences
• - Raise the engineering standard through hands-on delivery, pragmatic architecture, clear documentation, and review that helps other engineers grow

Let's connect if you have:

• - 6+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of complex production systems
• - Strong backend programming skills. Production experience with Rust is highly desirable, but we'll also consider strong systems experience in Go, C++, Zig, or Java
• - Experience building distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems with clear reliability and performance requirements
• - Strong knowledge of API/GraphQL design, PostgreSQL or another relational database, caching, queues, and observability
• - Experience with blockchain systems or other financial infrastructure involving real capital, particularly transaction signing, private-key or key-management flows, wallet infrastructure, and onchain transaction lifecycles, is highly desirable
• - Strong judgement around threat modelling, sensitive data, permissions, and the operational risks of systems handling financial value

Nice to haves:

• - Experience reading smart contracts and integrating with EVM-compatible networks, smart accounts, account abstraction, bridges, vaults, or DeFi protocols
• - Experience designing constraint, optimization, solver, or allocation systems
• - Experience building consumer fintech, savings, wallet, exchange, or payments products at meaningful scale
• - Experience with cross-chain indexing, large-scale data ingestion, Kafka, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure

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.