Staff Backend Engineer

Role Description

We're hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to work with a small and highly technical team building the infrastructure behind new DeFi protocols and vault products at Aave Labs. The role focuses on the systems between onchain protocols and the applications built around them. This includes:

• Vault management and curation systems
• Constraint-based allocation solvers
• Secure protocol infrastructure
• High-throughput blockchain indexing
• Performant, well-documented APIs

You'll work on systems where correctness, reliability, performance, and security directly affect user funds and protocol integrity. The role has significant ownership and autonomy across offchain infrastructure and components that interact closely with smart contracts and onchain state.

You will also work closely with Quant Engineers. Quant owns the financial models, assumptions, validation, and calibration. Backend owns the production systems, data pipelines, and services that run those models. Smart contract engineers own their onchain integration and enforcement.

How you can make an impact:

• Design, build, and operate backend infrastructure for new DeFi protocols and vault products
• Build vault management, curation, and constraint-based allocation systems
• Build high-throughput blockchain indexers and data-ingestion pipelines
• Design performant, stable, and well-documented APIs for applications and internal systems
• Work with Quant Engineers to turn reviewed models into reliable production services
• Work closely with smart contract engineers on systems that consume onchain state and submit onchain transactions
• Take technical ownership of projects and help maintain a high engineering standard across the team

Qualifications

• 5-8+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of production systems
• Strong experience with Rust. Experience with C++, Go, Zig, or another systems language can substitute
• Experience building high-performance, data-intensive, or event-driven backend systems
• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge
• Experience with blockchain, DeFi, financial infrastructure, or another environment involving real capital
• The ability to work independently in a high-autonomy environment
• Strong judgment around correctness, reliability, and security

Requirements

• Experience with cross-chain blockchain indexing or large-scale data ingestion (nice to have)
• Experience designing constraint, optimization, solver, or allocation systems (nice to have)
• Experience reading smart contracts and integrating with EVM-based protocols (nice to have)
• Experience operating financial systems where correctness and reliability affect capital (nice to have)
• Hands-on experience with Kafka and ClickHouse or similar analytical databases (nice to have)

Benefits

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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.