Staff Backend Engineer, Vaults

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 Staff Backend Engineer to work with a small and highly technical team building the infrastructure behind new DeFi protocols and vault products at Aave Labs.

The role focuses on the systems between onchain protocols and the applications built around them. This includes vault management and curation systems, constraint-based allocation solvers, secure protocol infrastructure, high-throughput blockchain indexing, and performant, well-documented APIs.

You'll work on systems where correctness, reliability, performance, and security directly affect user funds and protocol integrity. The role has significant ownership and autonomy across offchain infrastructure and components that interact closely with smart contracts and onchain state.

You will also work closely with Quant Engineers. Quant owns the financial models, assumptions, validation, and calibration. Backend owns the production systems, data pipelines, and services that run those models. Smart contract engineers own their onchain integration and enforcement.

How you can make an impact:

• Design, build, and operate backend infrastructure for new DeFi protocols and vault products
• Build vault management, curation, and constraint-based allocation systems
• Build high-throughput blockchain indexers and data-ingestion pipelines
• Design performant, stable, and well-documented APIs for applications and internal systems
• Work with Quant Engineers to turn reviewed models into reliable production services
• Work closely with smart contract engineers on systems that consume onchain state and submit onchain transactions
• Take technical ownership of projects and help maintain a high engineering standard across the team

Let's connect if you have:

• 5-8+ years of backend engineering experience, including ownership of production systems
• Strong experience with Rust. Experience with C++, Go, Zig, or another systems language can substitute
• Experience building high-performance, data-intensive, or event-driven backend systems
• Strong PostgreSQL knowledge
• Experience with blockchain, DeFi, financial infrastructure, or another environment involving real capital
• The ability to work independently in a high-autonomy environment
• Strong judgment around correctness, reliability, and security

Nice to haves:

• Experience with cross-chain blockchain indexing or large-scale data ingestion
• Experience designing constraint, optimization, solver, or allocation systems
• Experience reading smart contracts and integrating with EVM-based protocols
• Experience operating financial systems where correctness and reliability affect capital
• Hands-on experience with Kafka and ClickHouse or similar analytical databases