Staff Backend Engineer

About Privy: Privy is a fintech and identity infrastructure startup building secure wallet and digital asset APIs. We help companies onboard millions of users onto blockchain-based products with our scalable infrastructure. Our mission is to power digital ownership for all users through secure, enterprise-grade solutions.

About The Role: We are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join our engineering team and play a key role in designing and building the core infrastructure for our wallet and digital asset API. You will own critical systems that power our platform, focusing on scalability, security, and performance. This is an opportunity to significantly impact our infrastructure while mentoring other engineers and driving technical excellence.

What You’ll Do:

• Design, build, and maintain the backend systems that power our wallet infrastructure, onboarding flows, and on-chain integrations.
• Develop secure APIs and services using modern technologies to enable seamless integration with third-party applications.
• Implement and optimize distributed systems for handling massive transaction volumes and global user scaling.
• Collaborate with security teams to implement and enforce secure coding practices, including hardware-isolated secure enclaves and distributed key management.
• Lead technical design discussions and drive the implementation of best practices for scalability, reliability, and security.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to our engineering culture of excellence and ownership.
• Work closely with product teams to understand requirements and translate them into robust technical solutions.

What You’ll Bring:

• Proven experience leading complex backend engineering projects, preferably in fintech, blockchain, or high-throughput systems.
• Deep expertise in building distributed systems, microservices architecture, and API design.
• Strong proficiency in programming languages like Go, Java, or Python, with experience writing concurrent and distributed code.
• Solid understanding of security principles, particularly in the context of digital assets, key management, and secure enclaves.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Familiarity with blockchain concepts and smart contracts.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and ability to make thoughtful system-level tradeoffs.
• Strong communication and collaboration abilities, with experience leading cross-functional teams.

Compensation: The estimated pay range for this role is $160,000 - $230,000, plus potential equity participation.