This description is a summary of our understanding of the job description. Click on 'Apply' button to find out more. Role Description This Senior Backend Engineer role is essential to building and scaling the core Palette Labs platform from early foundations to a robust, production-grade system. - Own the design, development, and reliability of backend services that serve as nodes in our protocol or participants in it. - Focus on building well-architected web services, REST APIs, and foundational data systems that power applications and partner integrations. - Partner closely with the founders and product team to define long-term backend architecture, establish engineering best practices, and lay the groundwork for scale. - Success will be measured by the quality, reliability, and extensibility of the services built, and the ability to drive major technical milestones in the first 6–12 months. Responsibilities - Design and build production-grade web services and REST APIs from first principles. - Architect clean, maintainable service boundaries, data models, and internal interfaces. - Own backend systems end-to-end — from schema design to deployment and production reliability. - Implement best practices around transactional consistency, concurrency, and fault tolerance. - Establish observability standards (metrics, tracing, logging), SLOs, and operational playbooks. - Lead technical execution across major initiatives, ensuring systems are extensible and scalable. - Partner with product to translate ambiguous requirements into clean backend abstractions. - Raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing strategy, and long-term maintainability. Qualifications - 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, with a strong track record of shipping production systems. - Significant experience building and operating web services and RESTful APIs. - Experience in startup or early-stage environments where you’ve built systems 0→1. - Deep understanding of backend architecture fundamentals: service design, data modeling, API design, and distributed systems basics. - Strong experience with databases (schema design, indexing, query optimization, safe migrations). - Experience owning systems in production (observability, incident response, performance tuning). - Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (e.g., Rust, Go, TypeScript/Node, Java, C#, Python) and comfort learning new ones. Requirements - Production experience with Rust. - Experience designing service-oriented or microservice architectures. - Familiarity with event-driven systems (queues, pub/sub, async processing). - Experience working in high-transaction or financially sensitive systems. - Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containers, and Infrastructure as Code. - Strong product intuition and ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous environments. Benefits - A competitive annual salary, commensurate with your experience and industry standards. - Eligible for our company semi-annual performance bonus, which is tied directly to individual achievements. - We offer stock options to all full-time employees, allowing you to share directly in the company's success and long-term growth. - 100% employer‑covered premium options for Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for employees. - Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy.