Principal Backend Engineer

About us Aave Labs began with a simple question: how do we make financial services like borrowing, saving, and earning more accessible globally? We built the Aave Protocol, now the world’s largest and most trusted onchain lending market, connecting decentralized finance with individuals, traditional finance, and fintech. Today, we build trusted, high-quality products that expand access to lending, credit, and savings globally Our culture We build trusted products that help people access and discover economic opportunities. We hold a high bar for quality and craftsmanship. No detail is too small. Trust depends on it. We’re a global team building products people can actually use, turning complex technology into something simple and reliable. We stay aligned, move quickly, and think long term, while keeping teams lean and focused on impact. About the Role We're hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to lead the engineering team behind Push, Aave Labs' regulated, non-custodial on-ramp and off-ramp. This is a hands-on technical leadership role spanning the systems that connect banking and open-banking partners, identity and compliance controls, payment processing, blockchain settlement, customer wallets, and the applications through which customers access Push. You'll set the technical direction for a high-stakes financial product where correctness, security, auditability, and operational resilience directly affect customer funds and regulatory obligations. Alongside designing and building critical systems, you'll provide day-to-day leadership to the engineering team, create clarity from product and regulatory requirements, and ensure the team can deliver safely at pace. How you can make an impact: Own the technical direction and architecture for Push across backend services, external integrations, data flows, and onchain settlementTranslate product, regulatory, and operational requirements into a clear engineering roadmap, well-scoped projects, and sound technical decisionsDesign and build resilient services for on-ramp and off-ramp transaction lifecycles, including payment initiation, status tracking, settlement, exception handling, and customer notificationsLead integrations with open-banking, payments, identity, compliance, and blockchain infrastructure providersDefine secure boundaries between fiat systems, non-custodial wallets, and onchain execution, ensuring sensitive data, permissions, and signing-related flows are handled appropriatelySet and uphold standards for secure development, architecture review, testing, observability, incident response, deployment, and sustainable on-call ownershipPartner closely with Product, Compliance, Legal, Security, Operations, Finance, and application engineersRemain hands-on in the codebase, particularly for complex architecture, high-risk changes, and critical production issues Let's connect if you have: 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including senior technical leadership of production systems and teamsExperience designing distributed, event-driven systems that move or account for real money, with a strong understanding of failure modes and operational riskExperience with regulated financial products and understanding how to balance compliance and regulatory requirements with product features and goalsStrong backend programming skills. Production experience with Rust is highly desirable; deep experience with Go, Java, C++ can substituteStrong knowledge of API design, PostgreSQL or another relational database, messaging systems, and service-to-service integration patternsExperience in regulated fintech, payments, banking, digital assets, or another environment requiring auditability, controls, and high availabilityExcellent system-design judgement, including migration strategy, build-versus-buy decisions, security boundaries, and the long-term operational cost of architecture choicesA track record of leading engineers through ambiguous, high-impact work while remaining close to implementation and production operations Haven’t quite met all the criteria? Let’s not miss out on the chance to speak. Whilst you might not meet every single requirement, you might bring other, more exciting skills to the companies! Equal opportunities statement: Aave Labs celebrates diversity and views each and every team member as a separate individual with their own unique identity. No matter your race, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation or even the wallet you use, we welcome you at Aave Labs. As an equal opportunities employer, we take accountability and believe in everyone's potential to build, create and inspire changes. With a mission to build a diverse workforce, we are proud to foster a working environment in which everyone can feel safe and valued for who they are.