Senior Backend Engineer, Settlement & Ledger

NitinX is building regulated payment and settlement rails for digital assets backed 1:1 by allocated physical gold and silver. Verified customers can buy, hold, send, and redeem real metal value through auditable digital infrastructure that we license, operate, and stand behind. We are a small senior team in the Bay Area, backed by committed investors.

Why this role

You will own our core financial system of record: the internal double-entry ledger, the transaction lifecycle, and the reconciliation layer that keeps our books provably consistent with external systems. Crypto experience is not required and is not the point. If you have personally owned correctness of funds in a production payments, clearing, brokerage, or banking system, this role will feel familiar. You will be building from a clean sheet, with the design authority that implies.

What you will do

• Design an append-only double-entry ledger with an immutable journal, explicit account structure, holds, fees, reversals, and deterministic balance projections.
• Build the transaction lifecycle from initiation through completion, failure, retry, and reversal, with no ambiguous states and a defined path for every exception.
• Deliver effectively-once financial outcomes using idempotency, deduplication, outbox/inbox patterns, and concurrency controls, backed by reconciliation rather than wishful exactly-once guarantees.
• Build continuous reconciliation between the ledger and external systems of record, with exception queues and controlled remediation workflows.
• Integrate compliance and risk controls into the money-movement path with explicit fail-closed behavior.
• Instrument everything: audit logs, metrics, alerts, and the operator tooling a regulated financial institution needs for examinations.

• 6+ years of backend engineering, including 3+ years on production payments, money-movement, clearing, settlement, banking-core, brokerage, or exchange systems.
• You personally designed, shipped, and operated a production double-entry ledger or settlement system. Integrating payment APIs without owning correctness of funds does not qualify.
• Deep fluency in ledger invariants, money precision, idempotency, distributed transaction patterns, retries, reversals, and reconciliation.
• Strong in a typed backend language (Rust, Go, Java/Kotlin, or TypeScript) with production PostgreSQL or equivalent.
• Experience operating systems where incorrect balances create real financial exposure, including incident response and the control improvements that followed.
• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area and able to work with the team in person on a hybrid schedule.
• Authorized to work in the United States. We are unable to sponsor visas at this time., * building production payment, settlement, or ledger systems: 3 years (Required)
• Fintech: 5 years (Required)

Pulled from the full job description

• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance
• Life insurance
• Flexible schedule, * ACH, RTP/FedNow, card rails, brokerage clearing, exchange settlement, or digital asset experience.
• Integrating sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, limits, or case management.
• Property-based testing, event sourcing, external audit, or regulatory examination experience.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary $120,000 to $220,000 plus equity, health coverage, and standard benefits. The range reflects California pay-transparency requirements; placement depends on experience.

In-office cadence: 1-3 days/week.

Equal opportunity. NitinX evaluates applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Pay: $120,000.00 - $220,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Vision insurance