Staff Backend Software Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible Remote Work

$1000 WFH Stipend

MacBook Pro

Unlimited PTO

Country‑Specific Benefits

Job summary

Notabene is seeking a Staff Engineer to design and build the core transaction platform used by institutions worldwide. You will own critical parts of the system, drive architectural decisions, and mentor other engineers.

The role emphasizes correctness, auditability, and scalable performance in a regulated, cloud‑based environment. You will collaborate with product, compliance, and customer teams, write precise design docs, and contribute to production reliability through on‑call rotations and

Qualifications

• Distributed systems design with correctness criticality.
• Strong Go or production experience in a statically typed backend language.
• Deep PostgreSQL knowledge including multi‑tenant data.
• Cloud ownership with AWS or GCP including IAM, networking, managed databases.
• 8+ years building backend systems; staff‑level track record.
• Clear, concise writing in a remote/async company.
• Security fundamentals for sensitive data: encryption in transit and at rest.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core parts of our transaction platform.
• Mentor engineers on the team and contribute to reviews.
• Write design docs and push for robust, auditable code.
• Own production deployments, tracing, alerts, and incident follow‑ups.
• Collaborate with product, compliance, and customer teams to ship regulated software.
• Participate in on‑call rotations.

Job description

About Notabene

Notabene is on a mission to make crypto a part of the everyday economy. Leading crypto organizations use our tools to reduce transaction risk and make crypto transfers safe. Working across three continents in eight countries, the Notabene team serves our fantastic community of 100+ customers, including financial institutions, fintechs, exchanges, and more. Our co-founders spearheaded foundational Self Sovereign Identity protocols and use-cases. This technology is key to the internals of our cutting edge tech stack.

We’re proud to have the support of leading investors, including Y Combinator, Jump Capital, Castle Island, Green Visor Capital, and more.

We’re at an exhilarating moment in our journey, as regulation technologies (reg‑techs) are fast becoming recognized as a vital enabler of the crypto ecosystem. Notabene is growing fast—and we’re looking for people like you to help shape the future rails of the crypto industry!

The Impact You’ll Have:

Every crypto transfer we touch moves between institutions that run their own systems, answer to different regulators, and have no reason to trust each other. The software in the middle has to be right every time. A message processed twice, a lost update, or a record shown to the wrong tenant is a compliance failure for our customers.

You’ll work on the core platform that carries this data between institutions around the world, written in Go.

As a Staff Engineer on the team you’ll build the hardest parts of it, contribute to its design, and help the engineers around you do their best work.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build core parts of our transaction platform.
• Build for correctness under failure, with the isolation and auditability a regulated product needs.
• Scale the platform as transaction volume and the number of institutions per node grow, keeping latency predictable and the database healthy.
• Write design docs for what you build, and give sharp, useful reviews on other people’s designs and code.
• Build with AI agents every day, and help improve the specs, context and review practices that make agent‑written code safe to ship in a regulated product.
• Work with product, compliance and customer‑facing teams to turn regulatory and customer needs into working software.
• Own what you ship in production, from tracing and alerts to incident follow‑ups.
• Mentor engineers on the team.
• Work on an on call rotation

Must Haves

• Systems design depth. You’ve designed and owned distributed systems where correctness matters more than features. You know asynchronous processing well and can reason about what happens when parts of it fail.
• Strong Go, or deep production experience in another statically typed backend language (Java, Kotlin, Rust, C#) and the appetite to be shipping Go within your first weeks.
• PostgreSQL in depth: schema design, query plans, locking and isolation levels, migrations on live systems, and multi‑tenant data.
• End‑to‑end ownership in the cloud. Working knowledge of AWS or GCP: IAM, networking, managed databases, queues and storage. You can read and change Terraform and debug production from traces and logs.
• AI‑native engineering. You use coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor every day and can show how. You write the specs and context, break work down for them, and review their output as hard as a human pull request. You know where they fail.
• Staff‑level experience. A track record of delivering large, technically hard projects end to end and helping the engineers around you get better. Typically 8+ years building backend systems.
• Clear, concise writing in a remote company that makes decisions in documents and async threads.
• Security fundamentals for sensitive data: encryption in transit and at rest, key handling, minimising personal data, and least‑privilege access.

Nice‑to‑Haves

• Applied cryptography: encryption, signing and key management.
• Decentralized identity: DIDs, verifiable credentials, DIDComm.
• Regulated finance, payments or compliance: Travel Rule, AML, ISO 20022.
• Building and running software under SOC 2 or ISO 27001 controls.
• Crypto and blockchain knowledge: chains, addresses, assets, CAIP identifiers.
• Node.js and TypeScript.
• Queue and workflow systems, and modern observability tooling.

Benefits

• Flexible Remote Work: Work from anywhere!
• $1000 WFH Stipend: Use within your first year of employment.
• MacBook Pro: Procured by you and your manager to find a model that meets your needs.
• Unlimited PTO: We trust you to take as much holiday as you need.
• Country‑Specific Benefits: Statutory offerings and contributions, managed via our employer‑of‑record.

Notabene is proud to be an equal employment workplace and an affirmative action employer. By valuing inclusion and diversity of all forms, we strictly prohibit and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, ancestry, citizenship, sexual orientation, status as a protected veteran, or any other legally protected characteristic.