Senior Backend Engineer

Moonshot

$130K — $180K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-12+ years of backend or platform engineering experience in high-scale, high-availability systems, preferably in fintech or crypto.
  • Deep expertise in Identity & Access Management, financial systems including ledgering and payments, or blockchain infrastructure.
  • Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems like datastores and message queues.
  • Proven track record of driving architectural decisions to implementation.
  • Operational mindset with experience in monitoring, incident response, and postmortems.
  • Excellent collaboration skills with cross-functional teams, especially Product, Security, and Ops.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and operate Identity & Access Management services including authentication and authorization flows.
  • Own financial operations systems encompassing transfers, payments, and ledger reconciliation.
  • Build and maintain blockchain infrastructure, manage nodes and RPC, and handle transaction submissions.
  • Establish reliability and observability standards for core services including SLOs and error budgets.
  • Lead large, cross-functional technical projects from design through rollout, collaborating with other teams.
  • Mentor and guide other engineers, contributing to engineering standards and documentation.
  • Stay updated with industry best practices in authentication, key management, and secure infrastructure.

Benefits

  • 5% 401(k) match
  • Health benefits with employer-covered premiums
  • Life insurance coverage
  • One-time office setup stipend
  • Flexible PTO
Full Job Description
The Opportunity

As a Backend Engineer at Moonshot, you'll own some of the most critical systems in our stack: identity and access, funds movement and ledgering, and the blockchain infrastructure that powers our on-chain trading. This role is similar to staff engineers at leading crypto wallets and exchanges who own authentication stacks, key management, and high-scale financial backends. You'll design, build, and operate systems that must be both highly reliable and extremely secure, enabling product teams to move quickly on a solid foundation.

What You'll Do
  • Design, build, and operate Identity & Access Management services:
    • Authentication flows, sessions, device trust.
    • Authorization and entitlements (roles, permissions, policies).
    • Security controls such as MFA and key management (working with security teams).
  • Own financial operations systems:
    • Transfers and payments orchestration.
    • Ledgering and reconciliation flows.
    • Limits, risk controls, and transactional correctness.
  • Build and maintain blockchain infrastructure:
    • Node and RPC management.
    • Transaction submission, monitoring, and retry logic.
    • Indexing and streaming of on-chain data into internal services and data stores.
  • Define and uphold reliability and observability standards:
    • SLOs and error budgets for core services.
    • Dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and incident management practices.
  • Lead large, cross-functional technical projects from design through rollout, collaborating with Product, Security, and Ops.
  • Mentor and guide other engineers, contributing to engineering standards, design reviews, and documentation.
  • Stay close to industry best practices in auth, key management, and secure infrastructure for crypto and trading.
What We Look For in You
  • 5-12+ years of backend or product or platform engineering, including experience with high-scale, high-availability systems in fintech, crypto, or similar domains.
  • Deep expertise in at least one of:
    • Identity & access / security engineering
    • Financial systems / ledgering / payments
    • Blockchain infrastructure / on-chain data
  • Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems (datastores, queues, streaming, background workers).
  • Track record driving architecture decisions and seeing them through implementation and adoption.
  • Strong operational mindset: monitoring, on-call, incident response, and postmortems.
  • Excellent collaboration skills, especially with Product, Security, and Ops.
Nice to Haves
  • Experience with Flutter, React Native, React, Headless CRMs
  • Experience with Go, Rust, Solana
  • Experience with Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services
  • Experience with crypto wallets, exchanges, or onchain protocols including DeFi, L2s, ZK
  • Exposure to data warehousing and analytics for financial reporting.
  • Contributions to open-source projects.
Location
  • NYC preferred (with periodic in-person sprints).
  • Remote-friendly within the United States and Canada; travel ~1wk/quarter
Compensation & Package
  • Competitive salary and meaningful equity.
  • 5% 401(k) match.
  • Health benefits with employer-covered premiums, plus life insurance coverage.
  • One-time office setup stipend.
  • Flexible PTO.

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