Staff Software Engineer — Backend

Cari Network; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-friendly

401(k) with matching

Equity

Flexible vacation (PTO)

Job summary

Cari Network seeks a senior backend platform engineer to set technical direction for durable workflow orchestration, transaction ordering, and shared infrastructure patterns used by Banking and Blockchain teams.

You will design systems spanning services, establish reliability standards, enable cross-team impact with tooling, templates, and observability conventions, and align multiple engineering groups on a common direction.

Qualifications

• 8–10+ years of backend software engineering experience
• Deep expertise in durable workflow/orchestration systems or distributed transaction ordering
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript; production experience with Effect (effect.ts) or comparable functional effect system
• Experience designing systems that other teams build on top of
• Track record of driving cross-team technical alignment without formal authority
• Strong reliability instincts: idempotency, at-least-once delivery, crash recovery, reconciliation

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for cross-cutting backend platform infrastructure
• Design systems that span multiple services and define migration/versioning strategies
• Establish reliability standards across services, including load testing and deployment safety
• Build tooling, templates, and observability conventions to reduce org-wide overhead
• Align multiple engineering teams on a shared technical direction and communicate decisions

Skills

Backend

Distributed systems

TypeScript

Effect.ts

Cross-team alignment

Tools

Restate

CI/CD

Observability tooling

Job description

The Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system powering real-time, 24/7 movement of digital money across the traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. A pre-launch startup, we’re creating an entirely new category of financial infrastructure that brings cash on chain through tokenization while powering the full spectrum of payments for our network—banks, digital asset exchanges, and, most importantly, the customers they serve.

About the Role

You’ll set technical direction for the platform infrastructure that our Banking and Blockchain engineering teams both build on—durable workflow orchestration, transaction-ordering guarantees, and the shared architectural patterns that keep two fast-moving product teams from quietly reinventing the same infrastructure twice. This is a cross-team role: your decisions constrain and enable how both teams design their own services.

You’ll have deep expertise in at least one area the org draws on—most likely distributed transaction ordering, durable workflow systems, or data-consistency guarantees for financial flows—and you’ll be the person other senior and staff engineers escalates to when a cross-service design question doesn’t have an obvious owner.

What You’ll Do

Set the technical direction for cross-cutting backend platform infrastructure: durable workflow orchestration (Restate), transaction-ordering and concurrency-control patterns, and the shared primitives Banking and Blockchain services build on

Design systems that span multiple services—data flow across the platform, migration strategies for live systems, and versioning strategy for shared infrastructure APIs

Establish reliability standards that apply across services, not just your own: load testing profiles, deployment safety gates, and the failure-mode analysis that should happen before launch, not after

Multiply the team's impact through systems, not just review: build the tooling, templates, and enforced standards (shared CI patterns, reusable service scaffolding, common observability conventions) that reduce process overhead org-wide

Align multiple engineering teams on shared technical direction—this means building consensus, not just publishing a decision

Represent backend platform engineering in cross-org technical planning, and flag architectural risk before it becomes another team's incident

Qualifications

8–10+ years of backend software engineering experience, including a track record of setting technical direction across multiple services or teams, not just owning your own

Deep expertise in at least one of: durable workflow/orchestration systems, distributed transaction ordering, or data-consistency guarantees in financial or otherwise correctness-critical systems

Strong proficiency in TypeScript; production experience with Effect (effect.ts) or a comparable functional effect system strongly preferred

Experience designing systems that other teams build on top of—you understand what makes a shared platform component genuinely reusable versus just reused

Track record of driving cross-team technical alignment without formal authority over the teams you're aligning

Strong instincts around financial-grade reliability: idempotency, at-least-once delivery, crash recovery, and reconciliation, at a scale spanning multiple services

Comfortable identifying and naming architectural risk before it's anyone's incident

Nice to Haves

• Prior work in fintech, payments, or another regulated financial infrastructure environment, ideally at meaningful transaction scale
• Experience with blockchain or custody-adjacent transaction systems
• Track record of building internal platform tooling or standards adopted org-wide

What We Offer

• Competitive compensation: salary, bonus, and equity
• 401(k) with matching program
• Flexible vacation policy (PTO) and remote-first work environment