Staff Backend Engineer

The role focuses on the systems between blockchain protocols and the consumer experiences built around them. This includes account and wallet services, transaction orchestration, vault management, monitoring and rebalancing, partner vault integrations, high-reliability blockchain indexing, balances and yield data, funding and withdrawal flows, notifications, and performant, well-documented APIs for mobile and web clients.

You’ll own a broad technical area with high ownership and turn ambiguous product goals into reliable production systems. Correctness, security, and operability are critical: the services you build will support customer transactions, sensitive account flows, user funds, and financial data across both onchain and offchain infrastructure.

You’ll also work closely with Quant Engineers, who own the financial models, assumptions, and calibration behind vault allocation and rebalancing, and with smart contract engineers, who own onchain integration and enforcement. Backend owns the production systems, data pipelines, and services that run those models.

How you can make an impact:

• Design, build, and operate backend services for Aave App across onboarding, funding, savings, vaults, withdrawals, portfolio data, and customer communications
• Build vault management, monitoring, and rebalancing systems, including partner vault integrations, and work with Quant Engineers to turn reviewed allocation models into reliable production services
• Build transaction-orchestration and high-throughput indexing services that safely prepare, submit, monitor, and reconcile onchain activity across its full lifecycle
• Integrate with smart contracts, RPC providers, account infrastructure, payment partners, and other external services, designing for degraded dependencies and partial failure
• Lead technical reviews for high-value systems and improve testing, observability, alerting, incident response, and deployment practices across the backend codebase
• Work closely with mobile, web, product, design, protocol, smart contract, quant, security, data, and operations teams to deliver coherent consumer experiences
• Raise the engineering standard through hands-on delivery, pragmatic architecture, clear documentation, and review that helps other engineers grow

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of complex production systems
• Strong backend programming skills. Production experience with Rust is highly desirable, but we’ll also consider strong systems experience in Go, C++, Zig, or Java
• Experience building distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems with clear reliability and performance requirements
• Strong knowledge of API/GraphQL design, PostgreSQL or another relational database, caching, queues, and observability
• Experience with blockchain systems or other financial infrastructure involving real capital, particularly transaction signing, private-key or key-management flows, wallet infrastructure, and onchain transaction lifecycles, is highly desirable

• Strong judgement around threat modelling, sensitive data, permissions, and the operational risks of systems handling financial value Nice to haves:

• Experience reading smart contracts and integrating with EVM-compatible networks, smart accounts, account abstraction, bridges, vaults, or DeFi protocols
• Experience designing constraint, optimization, solver, or allocation systems
• Experience building consumer fintech, savings, wallet, exchange, or payments products at meaningful scale
• Experience with cross-chain indexing, large-scale data ingestion, Kafka, ClickHouse, or similar infrastructure Haven’t quite met all the criteria? Let’s not miss out on the chance to speak. Whilst you might not meet every single requirement, you might bring other, more exciting skills to the companies! Equal opportunities statement: Aave Labs celebrates diversity and views each and every team member as a separate individual with their own unique identity. No matter your race, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation or even the wallet you use, we welcome you at Aave Labs. As an equal opportunities employer, we take accountability and believe in everyone’s potential to build, create and inspire changes. With a mission to build a diverse workforce, we are proud to foster a working environment in which everyone can feel safe and valued for who they are.