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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 that bridge 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. Your work directly affects user funds and protocol integrity, requiring a high bar for correctness, reliability, performance, and security.
Key responsibilities include designing and building backend infrastructure for new DeFi protocols and vault products; building vault management, curation, and constraint-based allocation systems; creating high-throughput blockchain indexers and data-ingestion pipelines; designing performant, stable, and well-documented APIs for applications and internal systems; collaborating with Quant Engineers to turn reviewed financial models into reliable production services; and working closely with smart contract engineers on systems that consume onchain state and submit onchain transactions.
Required qualifications: 5-8+ years of backend engineering experience with ownership of production systems; strong Rust experience (C++, Go, Zig, or similar systems languages acceptable); experience building high-performance, data-intensive, or event-driven backend systems; strong PostgreSQL knowledge; and experience with blockchain, DeFi, financial infrastructure, or environments involving real capital.
Nice-to-have skills include cross-chain blockchain indexing or large-scale data ingestion experience, constraint/optimization/solver/allocation system design, ability to read smart contracts and integrate with EVM-based protocols, experience operating financial systems where correctness affects capital, and hands-on experience with Kafka and ClickHouse or similar analytical databases.
