Backend Engineer

Interested in helping us change the world of payments forever? The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is looking for a talented, experienced, and hands-on platform engineer to join our team. In this role, you’ll be designing, building, and implementing the tools and services that empower Stellar's ecosystem. By working within the platform team, you'll be working on open source projects that empower developers to use the Stellar network for a wide variety of goals and use cases.

You will:

• Be involved with all aspects of the development process for platform projects - from vision to final implementation.
• Design new platform functionality with the corresponding APIs for external developers.
• Build and maintain web services to support the foundation’s mission (increasing network participation, enabling lumen distribution, and highlighting the stability of the network).
• Identify patterns in developer needs and design new protocols and services to increase developer velocity across our entire ecosystem.
• Engage with our community of open source developers on projects that encompass many different frameworks, languages, and ideas.
• Collaborate with the team on code review and design, and contribute to best practices for all of engineering at SDF.
• Investigate and refactor performance bottlenecks in order to continue scaling our API services.
• Provide assistance and guidance for our integration projects with our partners and other organizations on the Stellar network.
• Author detailed technical feature and protocol (RFC) specifications - we take design seriously, and we encourage everyone to be a part of our RFC processes.

Requirements:

• You have 2+ years of experience developing software on a team.
• You have strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and information retrieval
• You're a language polyglot and have written server applications in languages such as Go, Python, Rust, C#, Java or C++.
• You have experience in supporting production web services at scale.
• You're a great communicator that can advocate and lead technical discussions, especially during the design and code review process.
• You have a solid understanding of software design patterns, and how to build components that are reusable, extensible, and modular.
• You are knowledgeable of existing frameworks and open source tools and are willing to build new frameworks when open ones do not exist.
• You have a passion for performance debugging and benchmarking.
• You're enthusiastic about working on a small, growing team where you'll be given a lot of autonomy.
• You're open, empathetic, and care about putting the best ideas forward in a collaborative and helpful manner.

Bonus points if:

• You have a BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent field.
• You generally enjoy working on a wide variety of smaller projects as opposed to regularly creating features in a single large system.
• You have a strong curiosity in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, and understand the fundamentals of these systems.

Benefits/Perks:

• Competitive health, dental & vision coverage (estimate costs here)
• Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break
• Parental leave (12 weeks)
• Life & ADD (up to $50K)
• Short & Long term disability
• FSA & Dependent Care Accounts
• 401K Matching
• Employee Assistance Program
• L&D budget of $1,500/year
• Company retreats

About Stellar

Stellar is a decentralized, fast, scalable, and uniquely sustainable network for financial products and services. It is both a cross-currency transaction system and a platform for digital asset issuance, designed to connect the world’s financial infrastructure. Dozens of financial institutions worldwide issue assets and settle payments on the Stellar network, which has grown to over 4 million accounts.

About the Stellar Development Foundation

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a non-profit organization that supports the development and growth of Stellar, an open-source network that connects the world’s financial infrastructure. Founded in 2014, the Foundation helps maintain Stellar’s codebase, supports the technical and business communities building on the network, and serves as a voice to regulators and institutions. The Foundation seeks to create equitable access to the global financial system, using the Stellar network to unlock the world’s economic potential through blockchain technology.
We look forward to hearing from you!

SDF is committed to diversity in its workforce and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. SDF does not make hiring or employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other basis protected by applicable local, state or federal law.