Staff Backend Engineer: Build Scalable DeFi Infrastructure

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

Job summary

Aave Labs seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to build the backend infrastructure behind Aave App and vault products. You will own a broad technical area, ensuring correctness, security, and operability as you connect onchain and offchain services for user funds and data.

You'll collaborate with Quant and smart contract engineers, shaping scalable systems and robust APIs for mobile and web clients. This role emphasizes ownership, reliability, and cross-functional teamwork across a global engineering

Qualifications

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience with ownership of complex production systems.
• Production experience with Rust is highly desirable; strong experience in Go, C++, Zig, or Java is acceptable.
• Experience building distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems with reliability and performance requirements.
• Strong knowledge of API/GraphQL design and relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL).
• Experience with blockchain or financial infrastructure, including wallet infrastructure and onchain lifecycles, is highly desirable.
• Strong judgement on threat modelling, sensitive data, and operational risks of financial systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate backend services for Aave App across onboarding, funding, savings, vaults, withdrawals, and data services.
• Develop vault management, monitoring, and rebalancing systems, including partner vault integrations, with Quant Engineers to convert allocation models into production services.
• Implement transaction orchestration and high-throughput indexing to safely handle onchain activity end-to-end.
• Integrate with smart contracts, RPC providers, account infrastructure, payment partners, and external services with resilience to degraded dependencies.
• Lead technical reviews for high-value systems and improve testing, observability, incident response, and deployment practices.
• Collaborate with mobile, web, product, design, protocol, security, data, and ops teams to deliver cohesive consumer experiences.
• Raise engineering standards through hands-on delivery, architecture, documentation, and mentoring.

Skills

Rust

Go

C++

Zig

Java

GraphQL API

PostgreSQL

Distributed systems

Observability

Security

Tools

Kafka

ClickHouse

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

Aave Labs seeks a Staff Backend Engineer to build the backend infrastructure behind Aave App and vault products. You will own a broad technical area, ensuring correctness, security, and operability as you connect onchain and offchain services for user funds and data.

You'll collaborate with Quant and smart contract engineers, shaping scalable systems and robust APIs for mobile and web clients. This role emphasizes ownership, reliability, and cross-functional teamwork across a global engineering