Senior Backend Engineer

Role 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.

You'll own core transaction processing platform infrastructure that our banking and blockchain services both build on—the durable workflow and ordering layer that keeps financial operations correct under concurrency.

You'll be the trusted technical decision-maker for the services you own—defining what production-ready looks like, leading incident response when something breaks, and writing the design docs that other engineers, including ones outside your immediate team, build against.

What You'll Do

• Own our transaction processing platform infrastructure for signing and settlement flows—service design, correctness guarantees, and operational health.
• Own the transaction-ordering and concurrency-control logic that keeps our transaction processing platform correct and consistent at scale.
• Design data models, API contracts, and retry/backoff logic for the services you own; write RFCs that Banking and Blockchain engineers rely on when integrating against your services.
• Define what "production-ready" means for platform services you own: SLOs, alerting thresholds, and runbooks.
• Lead incident response and root-cause analysis for the services in your domain, and drive postmortems that prevent recurrence.
• Reason about consistency models, failure modes, and capacity for the systems you own, and flag architectural risk before it becomes an incident.
• Coordinate directly with Banking and Blockchain engineers who depend on your services, translating their requirements into platform capabilities.

Qualifications

• 5–7 years of backend software engineering experience, ideally including systems with strict correctness or ordering guarantees (financial transactions, ledgers, distributed queues).
• Strong proficiency in TypeScript; experience with Effect (effect.ts) or a comparable functional effect system strongly preferred.
• Experience with durable workflow or orchestration systems (e.g. Temporal or similar)—either operating one in production or designing services on top of one.
• Solid understanding of concurrency control patterns: partitioned/keyed execution, idempotency, at-least-once delivery, and reconciliation.
• Production experience with PostgreSQL and Kafka or equivalent message infrastructure.
• Comfortable owning a service independently, including the judgment calls on reliability and design that come with it.
• Strong written communication—you'll be writing RFCs that people outside your immediate team act on.

Nice to Haves

• Prior work in fintech, payments, or another regulated financial infrastructure environment.
• Experience with blockchain or custody-adjacent systems (transaction signing, nonce management).
• Familiarity with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code for provisioning the services you own.
• Experience mentoring engineers or driving cross-team technical alignment.

What We Offer

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