Senior/Staff Software Engineer at Ethena Labs

Worldwide

<h3><span><strong id="docs-internal-guid-cda80cf5-7fff-9e70-15f1-ca0eb82d73c8">Role Overview</strong></span></h3><p><span>We're building a new engineering team at Ethena to own a money-movement product built on top of our stablecoin infrastructure. As the Staff/Senior Engineer, you own the correctness and evolution of the money-paths at the core of the product — payments, payouts, deposits, transfers, and reconciliation — and the app-facing APIs and authentication backend the native mobile app depends on.</span></p><p><span>Your north star: money always moves correctly, exactly once, and observably; and every request the app makes is fast, well-versioned, and secure. This is a senior IC role with real design authority over the backend — you set the standard for how these services are built, not just execute tickets.</span></p><h3><span><strong id="docs-internal-guid-cda80cf5-7fff-9e70-15f1-ca0eb82d73c8">Role Responsibilities</strong></span></h3><ul><li><p><span>Design, build, and own complex backend systems for a high usage consumer app.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Own the app-facing API contract as a product: versioned, backward-compatible endpoints with client idempotency keys, a consistent error model, and clean pagination, built in partnership with the iOS team.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Own the authentication and authorization backend, including the passkey/WebAuthn relying party, session/token lifecycle, and authorization enforcement at every API boundary.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Defend the auth surface against abuse through rate limiting, anomaly detection, and secure handling of PII and secrets.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Set patterns, tests, and documentation so the backend can be safely extended by any engineer, raising the correctness, testing, and security bar by example and in review.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Trace and document money-paths end-to-end, from API through wallet/executor/submitter/indexer, event streams, and on-chain settlement, closing real correctness and reliability gaps as you go.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Ship fast, test-first. Deliver on a tight cadence with test-driven and behaviour-driven development — you can prove the correctness of a payout path, not just its happy path.</span></p></li></ul><h3><span><strong id="docs-internal-guid-cda80cf5-7fff-9e70-15f1-ca0eb82d73c8">Required Skills and Experience</strong></span></h3><ul><li><p><span>Proven experience building and operating backend systems that move real money in production — payments, exchange/settlement, lending, banking, or crypto — with a track record of preventing (or fixing) idempotency, rounding, or reconciliation bugs.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Experience designing and owning client-facing APIs consumed by a mobile app at scale: contracts, versioning and backward compatibility, idempotency keys, error models, pagination, and rate limiting.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Experience building or operating an authentication/authorization backend — OAuth2/OIDC, JWT session/token lifecycle, RBAC/ABAC scopes, MFA/step-up — ideally including a WebAuthn/passkey relying party.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Hands-on integration with real financial third parties end-to-end (card issuing, KYC/fiat ramp partners, or payments/settlement providers), including their webhooks, failure modes, and reconciliation.</span></p></li><li><p><span>On-chain settlement literacy from the backend — nonces, gas, reorgs, RPC failure, confirmation depth — treating chain data as untrusted input.</span></p></li><li><p><span>Strong TypeScript (or a fast, credible path from Go/Kotlin/Rust/Java), with Postgres, an event/queue system (NATS/Kafka/SQS-class), and gRPC-based service-to-service communication at production scale.</span></p></li><li><p><span>A test-first culture matching ours — BDD/integration testing with real dependencies (Testcontainers-style) — and fluency with agentic development workflows (Claude Code, MCP, skills) as a core part of how you engineer.</span></p></li></ul>