Staff Backend Engineer — Blockchain Infrastructure

Socket.dev; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 220,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity opportunity

Medical Insurance

Dental and Vision Insurance

Life Insurance and AD&D

Relocation Assistance

Job summary

Nu is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define and guide backend systems that connect its products to blockchain networks. You will own architecture for onchain data, signing and custody boundaries, and asset movement, while partnering with product, security, and compliance teams to ensure security and reliability at scale.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive standards for reliability and observability, and lead critical design reviews and post-incident improvements across teams.

Qualifications

• Track record of staff-level impact designing and operating critical backend/platform systems used by multiple teams.
• Deep experience with distributed systems at scale, including transaction processing, eventual consistency, failure handling, high availability, and production operations.
• Production ownership of regulated or high-stakes financial movement, blockchain integrations, or adjacent money-moving infrastructure.
• Meaningful production experience in DeFi, custody, key management or signing flows, asset movement between wallets/entities, or smart-contract integrations.
• Experience designing security-sensitive systems using threat modeling, trust boundaries, defensive architecture, and rigorous review processes.
• Ability to define shared-platform architecture and drive adoption across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience leading complex production incidents and improving systems and operating practices afterward.
• Strong influence, communication, and mentorship skills to align teams without direct authority

Responsibilities

• Define the technical strategy and architecture for backend systems that connect Nu products to blockchain networks.
• Design and operate shared capabilities for onchain data, transaction execution, signing and custody boundaries, asset movement between wallets and entities, and smart-contract integrations.
• Establish secure transaction lifecycles, trust boundaries, threat models, failure handling, and defensive controls for high-stakes crypto infrastructure.
• Create APIs and platform abstractions that allow product teams to use blockchain capabilities without reproducing protocol complexity or weakening controls.
• Drive multi-team standards for reliability, observability, data integrity, auditability, testing, disaster recovery, and production readiness.
• Lead critical design reviews, major-incident response, root-cause analysis, and durable follow-up work across team boundaries.
• Partner with security, compliance, and product leaders to translate technical and regulatory constraints into scalable system designs.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise the area-wide bar for architecture, technical decision-making, and operational ownership.

Skills

Staff-level impact

Distributed systems

Production ownership

DeFi/custody/signing

Security-focused design

Platform architecture

Incident response

Mentorship influence

Job description

Nu is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to define and guide backend systems that connect its products to blockchain networks. You will own architecture for onchain data, signing and custody boundaries, and asset movement, while partnering with product, security, and compliance teams to ensure security and reliability at scale.

You will mentor senior engineers, drive standards for reliability and observability, and lead critical design reviews and post-incident improvements across teams.