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Aave Labs is hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the engineering team behind Push, a regulated, non-custodial on-ramp and off-ramp product. This is a hands-on technical leadership role spanning systems that connect banking and open-banking partners, identity and compliance controls, payment processing, blockchain settlement, customer wallets, and customer-facing applications.
You will set the technical direction for a high-stakes financial product where correctness, security, auditability, and operational resilience directly affect customer funds and regulatory obligations. The role combines strategic architecture work with day-to-day engineering leadership, translating product and regulatory requirements into clear roadmaps and sound technical decisions.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning technical direction and architecture for Push across backend services, external integrations, data flows, and onchain settlement
- Translating product, regulatory, and operational requirements into engineering roadmaps and well-scoped projects
- Designing and building resilient services for on-ramp and off-ramp transaction lifecycles, including payment initiation, status tracking, settlement, exception handling, and customer notifications
- Leading integrations with open-banking, payments, identity, compliance, and blockchain infrastructure providers
- Defining secure boundaries between fiat systems, non-custodial wallets, and onchain execution
- Setting and upholding standards for secure development, architecture review, testing, observability, incident response, and deployment
- Partnering closely with Product, Compliance, Legal, Security, Operations, Finance, and application engineers
- Remaining hands-on in the codebase, particularly for complex architecture, high-risk changes, and critical production issues
About Aave Labs: Aave Labs built the Aave Protocol, the world's largest and most trusted onchain lending market, connecting decentralized finance with individuals, traditional finance, and fintech. The company focuses on building trusted, high-quality products that expand access to lending, credit, and savings globally. The culture emphasizes quality, craftsmanship, global collaboration, and turning complex technology into something simple and reliable.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including senior technical leadership of production systems and teams
- Experience designing distributed, event-driven systems that move or account for real money, with strong understanding of failure modes and operational risk
- Experience with regulated financial products and ability to balance compliance and regulatory requirements with product features
- Strong backend programming skills; production experience with Rust is highly desirable; deep experience with Go, Java, or C++ can substitute
- Strong knowledge of API design, PostgreSQL or another relational database, messaging systems, and service-to-service integration patterns
- Experience in regulated fintech, payments, banking, digital assets, or similar environments requiring auditability, controls, and high availability
- Excellent system-design judgment, including migration strategy, build-versus-buy decisions, security boundaries, and long-term operational cost of architecture choices
- Track record of leading engineers through ambiguous, high-impact work while remaining close to implementation and production operations
