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.

What You’ll Do

• 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.

The Ideal Candidate will:

• Have relevant tertiary qualifications in computer science or a closely related field (bachelors/masters) and/or relevant work experience
• Have at least 5 year+ of experience in backend development, including 2+ years in a lead or senior engineering role.
• Proficiency in TypeScript, Go, Rust, or Python (depending on stack).
• Have a deep understanding of distributed systems, API design, and blockchain consensus node architecture.
• Experience with databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Hands-on experience integrating with blockchains, nodes, or smart contracts — e.g., via Web3.js, ethers.js, or JSON-RPC.
• Familiarity with DevOps best practices, deploying high-availability services across multiple regions (Kubernetes, GCP/AWS, or similar).
• Strong focus on security, reliability, and performance optimization.
• Excellent leadership, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Be high agency and effect the outcomes they wish to see.
• Demonstrate obsession and feel pride in building great experiences.
• Be highly collaborative with the internal team, other Wormhole collaborators, and customers.
• Care deeply about the business outcomes of your work and challenge priorities when the business impact is unclear.
• Enjoy working remotely with a talented global team and ideally based in the Americas or European time zones.