Staff Backend Engineer (Crypto Custody)

Location: Fully remote; any time zone with reasonable overlap with EU/CIS hours

Company

hirify.global develops The Vault, an MPC-based crypto custody platform for institutional and retail customers, with threshold signing, HSM and Ledger integrations, support for multiple chains and assets, post-quantum readiness, and SaaS-grade scale.

What you will do

• Design, build, and ship critical backend components including policy, signing orchestration, key lifecycle, recovery, approvals, audit trails, and multi-tenant wallet and account services.
• Lead cross-cutting initiatives through RFCs, design reviews, production code, and technical influence rather than hierarchy.
• Build high-load, multi-tenant SaaS systems with tenant isolation, quotas, rate limits, backpressure, concurrency control, and predictable latency.
• Develop reliable distributed workflows using idempotency, retries, event-driven patterns, sagas, state machines, replay, and graceful degradation.
• Implement security-by-design, performance, data modelling, observability, testing, rollout, and on-call practices for production systems.
• Set engineering patterns, mentor senior engineers, and use AI coding tools critically across appropriate areas of the codebase.

Requirements

• Strong computer science fundamentals, including concurrency, distributed systems, consistency models, networking, operating systems, locks, and channels.
• Ownership of non-trivial production systems end to end: design, shipping, measurement, improvement, and on-call operations.
• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including 3+ years at Staff level or equivalent senior individual-contributor scope.
• Strong production experience with Go, Rust, Java, C++, or a comparable modern systems language; hands-on Go experience or readiness to ramp up within the first month.
• Staff-level technical leadership through code, RFCs, written communication, and influence without formal team authority.
• Production experience building high-load, multi-tenant SaaS with high availability, incident response, and SLOs.
• Hands-on experience with gRPC or HTTP, queues or streams, caching, relational databases, and Kafka, NATS, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong testing and observability practices, including unit, integration, and contract tests, deterministic CI, structured logging, metrics, tracing, and production debugging.
• Required: production-grade use of modern AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or comparable tools, with the ability to critically review AI-generated code.

Nice to have

• Experience with custody, wallets, signing systems, MPC, HSM, TEE, key management, or approvals.
• Ledger integration and experience with multiple blockchain ecosystems, including EVM and Bitcoin.
• Custom agents, MCP integrations, in-repository AI workflows, or evaluations for AI-generated code.
• Kubernetes, service mesh, SRE practices, regulated environments, threat modelling, and security reviews.
• Familiarity with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and DORA.

Culture & Benefits

• Staff individual-contributor role with technical leadership and no people management, sprint mechanics, or platform-wide architecture ownership.
• AI-forward engineering culture with budget and autonomy for tools, models, and agents.
• Direct collaboration with cryptography research, security architecture, product, and delivery peers.
• Fully remote work with reasonable overlap with EU/CIS hours.
• Competitive Staff engineer compensation, equity participation, and full benefits.
• Series A-stage product with paying institutional customers and a published cryptographic research line.

Hiring process

• Submit a CV and short note, ideally including non-trivial code or a system whose design you led.
• A link to non-trivial code shipped with AI tooling, such as a repository, write-up, or demo, is strongly preferred.
• No take-home assignment; the process includes a structured technical conversation covering CS fundamentals, ownership, and practical AI-tool usage.