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Aave Labs is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to join a small, highly technical team building infrastructure for new DeFi protocols and vault products. The role focuses on systems bridging onchain protocols and applications built around them, including vault management and curation systems, constraint-based allocation solvers, secure protocol infrastructure, high-throughput blockchain indexing, and performant APIs.
You will have significant ownership and autonomy across offchain infrastructure and components that interact closely with smart contracts and onchain state. Key responsibilities include designing and building backend infrastructure for new DeFi protocols and vault products, constructing vault management and curation systems, building high-throughput blockchain indexers and data-ingestion pipelines, designing performant and well-documented APIs for applications and internal systems, and working closely with Quant Engineers and Smart Contract Engineers to turn financial models into reliable production services.
The role demands strong technical judgment around correctness, reliability, and security, as these systems directly affect user funds and protocol integrity. You'll work in a high-autonomy environment where you take technical ownership of projects and help maintain high engineering standards across the team.
Required qualifications include 5-8+ years of backend engineering experience with ownership of production systems, strong Rust experience (or equivalent systems language like C++, Go, or Zig), experience building high-performance data-intensive or event-driven backend systems, strong PostgreSQL knowledge, and experience with blockchain, DeFi, financial infrastructure, or similar environments involving real capital.
Nice-to-have skills include experience with cross-chain blockchain indexing or large-scale data ingestion, designing constraint/optimization/solver/allocation systems, reading smart contracts and integrating with EVM-based protocols, operating financial systems where correctness affects capital, and hands-on experience with Kafka and ClickHouse or similar analytical databases.
