Backend Engineer, Integrations & APIs
About The Position
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is seeking a Backend/Systems Engineer to own the critical layer between their core infrastructure and the outside world, focusing on the public API, indexing, data pipelines, and making the system usable by developers and partners. This is a greenfield project, not a maintenance role, aiming to build a high-performance platform designed to handle real value. The role involves working directly with the protocol architect and core systems engineers on a zero-to-one build, taking a novel distributed systems prototype to production. The ideal candidate has experience with complex infrastructure launches and understands what "production-grade" means for systems handling real value. The first few months will involve understanding the system architecture, getting the full stack running locally, owning the JSON-RPC spec, building an RPC endpoint, and developing an indexer for a block explorer. Future work includes data pipelines, partner integrations, API hardening, and load testing.
Requirements
- Strong systems or backend programming experience in Rust, C++ or both.
- Proven track record of designing and building robust RPC/API services that handle real-world, high-scale traffic.
- Deep understanding of database architecture, indexing, and query patterns.
- A builder who takes ownership of production infrastructure, not just prototypes.
Nice To Haves
- Prior experience building or operating blockchain infrastructure (nodes, RPC layers, indexers) in production.
- Experience with a testnet or mainnet launch.
Responsibilities
- Design and build the JSON-RPC endpoints that external tools, SDKs, and wallets use to communicate with the core network (transaction submission, status queries, account state).
- Own the full path from client to consensus and back, including status tracking, error reporting, and timeout handling.
- Build the data backend that powers the block explorer, partner integrations, and historical state queries.
- Build out analytics pipelines (e.g., BigQuery population) and implement robust metrics and event logging using tools like Prometheus, Clickhouse, and Sentry.
- Work across service boundaries, getting comfortable reading code in components you don't own to understand how they behave.
Benefits
- Competitive health, dental & vision coverage with most plans covered at 100% for the employee + any dependents
- Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break
- Generous paid parental leave for all parents, plus paid pregnancy disability leave for birthing parents
- Gym reimbursement ($80 per month)
- Life & ADD (up to $50K)
- Short & Long term disability
- 401K with 4% match
- Health & Dependent Care FSA Accounts
- Commuter benefits with $250/month employer contribution
- Health Savings Account (HSA) with monthly employer contribution
- Family building benefits through Kindbody
- Wellbeing benefits (One Medical, Rightway, Headspace)
- L&D budget of $1,500/year
- Daily lunch and snacks in office
- Company retreats
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
