Backend Engineering Lead

Backend Engineering Lead

As a Backend Engineering Lead at the Wormhole Foundation, you will make significant contributions to Wormhole’s ecosystem of open source smart contracts and protocols. Reporting to our Head of Product, you will own the architecture, development, and evolution of our backend systems. You’ll be responsible for leading a team that delivers intuitive, performant, and secure interfaces across our suite of products.

• Lead the backend engineering strategy, ensuring scalability, reliability, and top‑tier user experience.
• Architect, design, and implement APIs and data pipelines supporting wallets, transactions, and blockchain integrations.
• Build and maintain high‑performance systems for blockchain data indexing, analytics, and event processing.
• Integrate new blockchain ecosystems into Wormhole’s suite of products, building adapters for novel consensus mechanisms, RPCs, and event formats.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Frontend, and other teams to deliver end‑to‑end solutions.
• Drive technical discussions, code reviews, and architectural decisions for backend components.
• Ensure adherence to best practices in testing, deployment, observability, and documentation.
• Mentor and coach backend engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and ownership.
• Contribute to the evolution of our infrastructure stack and the scaling of the engineering organization.

• Hold relevant tertiary qualifications in computer science or a closely related field (bachelor’s or master’s) and/or relevant work experience.
• Have at least 5 years of experience in backend development, including 2+ years in a lead or senior engineering role.
• Demonstrate proficiency in Type Script, Go, Rust, or Python (depending on stack).
• Possess a deep understanding of distributed systems, API design, and blockchain consensus & node architecture.
• Have experience with databases (Postgre
  
  SQL, Mongo
  
  DB, Redis) and event‑driven systems (Kafka, Rabbit
  
  MQ).
• Be hands‑on with integrating with blockchains, nodes, or smart contracts—e.g., via Web
  3.js, ethers.js, or JSON‑RPC.
• Show familiarity with Dev Ops best practices, deploying high‑availability services across multiple regions (Kubernetes, GCP/AWS, or similar).
• Focus strongly on security, reliability, and performance optimization.
• Exhibit strong leadership, communication, and cross‑functional collaboration skills.
• Be highly collaborative with internal teams, Wormhole collaborators, and customers, and be comfortable working remotely with a global team, ideally based in the Americas or European time zones.
• Be a high‑agency individual who drives outcomes, demonstrates obsession for building great experiences, and cares deeply about business outcomes, challenging priorities when impact is unclear.

The application process is open for interested and qualified candidates.