Senior backend engineer

Moonshot is the “Robinhood for DeFi”—an iOS and Android app that lets anyone trade cryptocurrencies on-chain through a user-friendly interface. Since our launch in July 2024, we’ve attracted 2M+ users. Our mission: Make moonshots possible for everyone. Our vision: Make a world where life-changing financial outcomes are within everyone's reach. Everyone on our team is both a decision-maker and an implementer—united by a sense of urgency and driven by the conviction that our work can transform global finance. If you thrive on curiosity, welcome tough challenges, and aspire to leave a meaningful mark on the world, Moonshot is the place for you.

You’ll run toward the hardest problems alongside high-caliber teammates who consistently push each other to excel and who share your dedication to shaping the future of decentralized finance.

This role is full-time, preferably located in NYC. Open to remote for the right candidate.

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.