Rust Software Engineer Lead, Distributed Ledger (Rust)

Location: New York City area preferred; remote candidates must reliably work Eastern Time hours and travel to New York as needed for customer sessions, planning, and key team meetings.

Salary: $133,980–$227,770 annual.

Company

hirify.global is building Keystone, a bank-grade network infrastructure product on the LYRIQ platform for regulated digital value movement, tokenized deposits, digital liquidity, and bank-led payment and settlement use cases.

What you will do

• Build and operate the Rust-based permissioned, BFT-replicated distributed ledger, including consensus, block finality, RocksDB state storage, snapshots, and recovery.
• Develop cryptography and key-custody capabilities using Ed25519, Merkle-committed state, AWS KMS, HSMs, Intel SGX, and AWS Nitro Enclaves.
• Implement programmable transfer and access rules through expression languages, parsers, type checkers, compilers, and bytecode interpreters.
• Design gRPC and REST services, Protocol Buffers APIs, CLI tooling, and multi-language SDKs for bank and customer integrations.
• Build ledger indexing and observability pipelines with ClickHouse, Postgres, Prometheus metrics, and tracing.
• Improve correctness through deterministic simulations, fault injection, property-based testing, fuzzing, and formal model checking.

Requirements

• Six or more years of professional backend or systems engineering experience, including at least three years writing production Rust.
• Deep experience with asynchronous Rust, including Tokio, futures, traits, generics, lifetimes, and Send/Sync reasoning.
• Hands-on knowledge of blockchain or distributed-ledger internals, such as BFT, Raft, Paxos, transaction validation, Merkle trees, state storage, or node networking.
• Practical cryptography knowledge covering digital signatures, hashing, key derivation, custody, and trust boundaries.
• Experience designing service APIs, preferably gRPC and Protocol Buffers, with backwards compatibility for versioned clients.
• Experience operating production systems with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, metrics, tracing, and distributed/concurrent testing.

Nice to have

• Experience with central bank digital currency, tokenized deposits, payments, core banking systems, or ISO 20022.
• Trusted execution environments, HSMs, PKCS#11, language or VM implementation, ClickHouse, Kafka, sqlx, or Postgres schema migrations.
• Experience with TypeScript, Python, Go, or public contributions to Rust and distributed-ledger open-source projects.

Culture & Benefits

• Small, senior teams own services from design through production operation.
• Code review, cargo fmt, pre-commit checks, CI, consensus simulation, contract tests, and nightly integration runs support engineering quality.
• Emphasis on signed commits, clean history, operational evidence, and durable technical documentation.
• Full-time employment with a stated annual compensation range and location-adjusted starting pay.