Staff Backend Engineer

About the role

The Vault is building an MPC‑based crypto custody platform for institutional and retail clients. We are looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to design and ship the most challenging backend components of the platform. This is a hands‑on individual contributor role with real technical leadership, no people‑management responsibilities.

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement, and ship core platform services such as the policy engine, signing orchestration, key‑lifecycle workflows, approvals, audit trails, and multi‑tenant wallet services.
• Lead cross‑cutting initiatives through RFCs, design reviews, and production code, driving architecture decisions within your ownership area.
• Build high‑load, multi‑tenant SaaS systems with tenant isolation, rate limiting, back‑pressure, and predictable latency under spikes.
• Ensure reliability with idempotency, retries, outbox/inbox patterns, event‑driven workflows, sagas, and graceful degradation.
• Apply security‑by‑design principles (least privilege, mTLS/JWT, tamper‑evident logs) to meet SOC 2, ISO 27001, and DORA requirements from day one.

Required profile

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including at least 3 years at a Staff‑level or equivalent senior IC scope.
• Strong CS fundamentals: concurrency, distributed systems, consistency models, networking, and OS behavior.
• Ownership mindset with end‑to‑end responsibility for production systems, on‑call experience, and a track record of influencing through code and RFCs without formal authority.
• Hands‑on experience with a modern systems language (Go, Rust, Java, C++); ready to work in Go immediately.

Required skills

• Go (or willingness to ramp quickly), Rust, Java, C++.
• gRPC/HTTP, message queues or streams (Kafka, NATS), caching layers.
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL), migrations, indexing, and strong data modeling.
• Distributed system patterns: idempotency, retries, outbox/inbox, sagas, state machines.
• AI‑assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) with proven production use.
• Kubernetes, service mesh, and SRE practices.

What we offer

• Technical leadership without people‑management duties.
• AI‑forward engineering culture with budget and autonomy for tooling.
• Fully remote work with reasonable overlap with EU/CIS hours.
• Competitive staff‑level compensation, equity participation, and full benefits.
• Opportunity to shape a product approaching Series A with paying institutional customers.