Staff Backend Engineer — Crypto Custody Platform

The Vault; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

The Vault is seeking a Staff Engineer to design and ship the custody platform’s most critical backend components. This hands-on IC role requires technical leadership without people management, guiding RFCs, architecture, and mentorship across teams.

You will own end-to-end features—policy engine, signing orchestration, key lifecycle, and audit trails—while enabling high-load, multi-tenant SaaS with strong security and reliability from day one.

Qualifications

• Strong CS fundamentals and ability to reason about concurrency, distributed systems, and OS behavior.
• Ownership mindset: own production systems end-to-end, not just implement.
• 10+ years backend engineering with 3+ years at Staff level, in Go/ Rust/Java/C++ or similar.
• Track record of Staff-level technical leadership through code, RFCs, and influence.
• Proven experience building high-load, multi-tenant SaaS in production.
• Hands-on with modern backend stacks: gRPC/HTTP, queues, caches, relational DBs, Kafka/NATS.
• Proficient with AI coding tools and able to review AI-generated code critically.

Responsibilities

• Design, write, and ship critical platform components like policy engine and signing orchestration.
• Lead non-trivial cross-cutting initiatives through RFCs, design reviews, and code.
• Build high-load, multi-tenant SaaS systems with tenant isolation and quotas.
• Ensure distributed systems reliability: idempotency, retries, event-driven workflows.
• Adopt security-by-design: least privilege, secret handling, mTLS/JWT, audit-ready data models.
• Focus on performance: profiling, load testing, indexing, migrations.
• Integrate AI tooling in development while avoiding unsafe automation for cryptographic core.
• Set shared libraries and patterns; own features end-to-end including observability and on-call.
• Mentor senior engineers with strong design and review signals.

Skills

CS fundamentals

Ownership mindset

10+ years backend

Staff leadership

Go/Rust/Java/C++

AI coding tools

Distributed systems

gRPC/HTTP

Tools

Postgres

Kafka/NATS

Relational DBs

Kubernetes

Job description

The Vault is seeking a Staff Engineer to design and ship the custody platform’s most critical backend components. This hands-on IC role requires technical leadership without people management, guiding RFCs, architecture, and mentorship across teams.

You will own end-to-end features—policy engine, signing orchestration, key lifecycle, and audit trails—while enabling high-load, multi-tenant SaaS with strong security and reliability from day one.