Senior Staff Backend Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Kazakhstan, +5 more countries.

📋 Description

• Design, develop, and deliver essential components for the custody platform, including policy engines, signing orchestration, key lifecycle workflows, recovery processes, approvals, audit trails, and multi-tenant wallet and account services.

• Spearhead significant cross-cutting initiatives through the creation of written RFCs, participation in design reviews, and coding efforts.

• Construct high-load, multi-tenant SaaS systems that ensure tenant isolation, enforce quotas, apply rate limits, manage backpressure, control concurrency, and maintain predictable latency during peak loads.

• Implement reliability patterns for distributed systems, such as idempotency, retries, outbox/inbox mechanisms, event-driven workflows, sagas, state machines, replay capabilities, and graceful degradation.

• Employ security-by-design principles, including least privilege access, secret management, mTLS/JWT implementation, tamper-evident logging, and audit-ready data models for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and DORA compliance.

• Enhance performance and data systems through profiling, load testing, benchmarking, contention analysis, garbage collection tuning, relational modeling, migrations, and indexing techniques.

• Utilize Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex for production-level development while contributing to AI engineering practices.

• Establish patterns and shared libraries for managed services; elevate engineering standards through code reviews and exemplary practices.

• Take ownership of features from start to finish, encompassing RFCs, coding, testing, observability, rollout, and on-call duties.

• Mentor senior engineers through reviews and the crafting of written designs.

⛳️ Requirements

• Strong foundational knowledge in computer science, enabling reasoning from first principles regarding concurrency, distributed systems, consistency models, networking, and operating system behavior; possess a deep understanding of locks and channels beyond the API level.

• Proven ownership of complex production systems from design through deployment, measurement, improvement, and on-call responsibilities.

• Over 10 years of backend engineering experience, including a minimum of 3 years operating at a Staff level or equivalent senior individual contributor capacity.

• Significant production experience in a modern systems programming language such as Go, Rust, Java, C++, or a similar language.

• Practical experience with Go, or a strong willingness to learn it within the first month.

• Demonstrated history of Staff-level technical leadership through contributions in code, RFCs, and influence without formal authority.

• Established success in building high-load, multi-tenant SaaS solutions in production environments, including high availability, incident response, and service level objectives (SLOs).

• Hands-on experience with gRPC/HTTP, queues/streams, caching mechanisms, relational databases, and technologies like Kafka/NATS or equivalents.

• Strong discipline in unit, integration, and contract testing; embrace testability-first design principles and deterministic continuous integration.

• Excellent observability skills, including structured logging, metrics collection, tracing, and comprehensive production debugging capabilities.

• REQUIRED: Practical, production-grade experience using modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar.

• Ability to critically assess AI-generated code, ensuring that only comprehensible code is shipped.

🏝️ Benefits

• A Staff individual contributor role offering genuine technical leadership without the burden of people management, sprint mechanics, or architecture dictated by committee.

• An engineering culture that prioritizes AI, providing the budget and autonomy necessary for the tools, models, and agents you require.

• Collaborate directly with peers in cryptography research, security architecture, product development, and delivery, ensuring you're not the sole senior voice in discussions.

• Fully remote position with flexibility in time zones, provided there is reasonable overlap with EU/CIS hours.

• Competitive compensation in the Staff engineer band, including equity participation and comprehensive benefits.

• Engage with a product nearing Series A funding with active institutional customers and a published line of cryptographic research.