Staff Backend Engineer
Remote (United States) · Individual contributor (no direct reports) · Full-time
Own the backend that every ChainIT product runs on. We're hiring our first in-house Staff engineer to take architectural stewardship of the ChainIT core platform — the ~25-service NestJS backend behind biometric identity, verified agreements, NIL payments, and on-chain asset tokenization.
About ChainIT
ChainIT is a private, US-based, blockchain-anchored digital-identity and biometrics platform headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona. Our mission is to create a zero-trust digital future, where every identity, action, and agreement is verified, not assumed. We prioritize Truth over Trust: every record we create is a Validated Data Token (VDT) — an immutable, tamper-proof record of *who, where, what, and when*, anchored on-chain and backed by 14+ granted U.S. patents and a growing IP portfolio.
One core platform powers our entire product family — ChainIT-ID (biometric KYC), ChainIT Org / KYB (business verification), Pactvera (biometric smart agreements), Sportafi (college-athlete NIL payments), Age App (privacy-first age verification), ChainITX (physical-asset tokenization), Touch Audit (tamper-evident audit trails), ChainIT Pay (embedded payments), and a developer SDK launched at Consensus 2025.
About the role
For five years, our core platform — the universal backend beneath every ChainIT product — has been built and run largely by an external development partner. As the platform has become core to the business, we're bringing ownership in-house, and you are the first in-house Staff engineer to own it.
You take architectural stewardship of the platform and become the accountable owner of its architecture, quality, reliability, and technical direction — serving every product team, not a single product, so one well-designed change compounds across the whole portfolio.
This is not greenfield. You inherit a mature, revenue-bearing production system with genuine scope — and honest, acknowledged gaps you're trusted to close. If you want the rare combination of deep existing surface area *and* true founding ownership — where you define what "done" and "good" mean for an entire company's backend — this is that seat.
It is a Staff-level individual-contributor role with no direct reports. Your leverage is architecture, influence, and mentorship, not headcount. You coordinate with our external development partner; you don't supervise them.
What you'll own
· The architecture, quality, and reliability of our core platform — ~25 NestJS microservices on AWS EKS — taking full in-house stewardship from our external development partner and serving every product team.
· The highest-scope, cross-service problems: event-driven messaging over RabbitMQ, CQRS, data consistency across per-service PostgreSQL/TypeORM, caching and async jobs on Redis/Bull, and versioned API contracts.
· The engineering bar for everyone who builds on the platform — shared libraries and service templates, coding standards, OpenAPI and API-versioning discipline, and a definition-of-done that includes tests, observability, and non-functional requirements.
· Reliability across the fleet — SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, on-call and runbook maturity, incident response, and telemetry (Sentry, structured logging, metrics, tracing).
· Architecture governance — lightweight decision records (ADRs) and design reviews, making the long-term architectural bets other engineers build on.
· The platform's highest-trust surfaces — a secure data-exchange over PII, biometric identity-verification orchestration, the immutable audit ledger, and AWS KMS-backed on-chain signing.
· Mentorship through influence — you'll grow senior and mid-level engineers, raise code-review quality, and lead the handoff of ownership from the external development partner to in-house engineering.
Your first year
You'll inherit a working platform with real, well-understood technical debt — and the mandate to pay it down. High-leverage early missions include:
· Install the automated-test safety net. Coverage is effectively zero today and CI gates on lint only — you'll lead the in-progress regression-test backfill and define what "tested" means going forward.
· Make deploys safe. Introduce an in-bootstrap migration runner and migration discipline across services (most run migrations manually today).
· Finish the in-flight ledger migration. Complete the append-only-ledger (QLDB) transition that's currently mid-flight.
· Advance the identity-layer migration. Move the platform's authentication from Auth0 to AWS Cognito — an in-flight modernization spanning every product's login path.
· Harden the highest-trust surfaces. Close known security gaps across authentication, input validation, and outbound calls.
· Tame the hotspots. Bring structure to the high-churn services and oversized modules that drive most regressions.
We'll be candid about the state of the platform in your interviews — because owning exactly these problems is the job, and it's what makes the role worth a Staff engineer's time.
What you'll bring
· Deep, demonstrated experience (typically 8+ years) designing, building, and operating scalable backend systems in production — we level on scope and impact, not tenure alone.
· Expertise in Node.js / TypeScript with a mature backend framework (NestJS strongly preferred, or an equivalent such as Spring, Django, or Rails).
· Proven system-design skill for distributed, service-oriented architectures: service boundaries, APIs, and versioned interfaces.
· Hands-on experience with event-driven / asynchronous architecture — a message broker (RabbitMQ or Kafka) and patterns such as CQRS.
· Strong data-layer depth with relational databases (PostgreSQL) and an ORM (TypeORM or equivalent), plus caching (Redis) and sound schema/consistency judgment.
· Production experience with cloud + containers/orchestration (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/EKS).
· A track record of raising testing and quality culture — introducing or maturing automated testing in a production codebase.
· Demonstrated Staff-level behaviors: technical leadership and mentorship through influence, and strong cross-team collaboration and written/verbal communication.
Nice to have
· Experience building internal platforms, shared frameworks, or developer-experience / SDK tooling.
· Familiarity with parts of our stack — NestJS CQRS, Bull queues, and AWS services (Cognito, QLDB, Rekognition, KMS, S3/CloudFront) — we'll ramp you on the rest.
· Exposure to a regulated or compliance-heavy domain: identity / KYC / KYB, biometrics / IDV, fintech / payments, or blockchain / web3.
· Experience taking a system in-house from a vendor or agency, or leading a large modernization / refactor.
· Working knowledge of observability tooling (metrics / tracing / SLOs) and infrastructure-as-code (Helm, AWS CDK, or Terraform).
· Familiarity with immutable / append-only ledgers or on-chain (KMS) signing, and with multi-IdP auth (Auth0, AWS Cognito, JWT/Passport).
Our stack
You don't need every item below — but this is what you'll be working in and shaping:
· Language & framework: Node.js + TypeScript; NestJS 10 with CQRS and hexagonal (ports/adapters) layering
· Monorepo: Nx (~25 independently deployable microservices)
· Data: PostgreSQL + TypeORM 0.3.x (per-service databases and migrations); Amazon QLDB append-only "Validated Data Token" ledger
· Messaging & async: RabbitMQ event-driven message patterns (dual HTTP/REST + message transport per service); Redis + Bull for caching and job queues
· API surface: REST + Swagger/OpenAPI, URI-versioned (/v1); we consume an external Hasura GraphQL instance as a client
· Cloud & delivery: AWS EKS + Helm, ElastiCache, S3/CloudFront, SES/SNS, Route 53, AWS CDK
· Identity & trust: Multi-IdP — AWS Cognito and Auth0 (mid-migration from Auth0 to Cognito) plus custom JWT/Passport with org-scoped RBAC; AWS Rekognition and third-party IDV vendors for biometrics; AWS KMS custodial signing for dual-chain (Polygon + Ethereum) tokenization
· Observability: Sentry + structured logging (pino) + Grafana/Prometheus
· Testing: Jest (framework wired; the regression-coverage backfill is a core part of this role)
Compensation & benefits
· Base salary: The expected base salary range for this role is $160,000–$200,000. Final compensation will be determined based on job-related skills, depth of backend/platform experience, and geographic location.
· Meaningful equity — stock options and real ownership upside in a patent-backed platform. We're a private company, so we're honest that equity is upside, not liquid compensation, and we compete on cash.
· Founding-owner autonomy and company-wide technical impact — the differentiators we lead with: you set the standard for an entire company's backend, with no layers between you and the architecture.
· Health / dental / vision coverage · retirement plan · paid time off and parental leave · home-office and equipment stipend · learning budget.
How we work
This is a remote (United States) role. We value clear async communication, written decision-making, and consistent team overlap for collaboration.
We'd love to hear from you
Excited about this role and mission but don't check every box? We still want to hear from you — the best people rarely match a posting line-for-line. If you've owned backend systems at scale, are comfortable being the most senior engineer in the room, and lead through influence rather than authority, you may be exactly who we're looking for.
Pay: $160,000.00 - $200,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Paid time off
Application Question(s):
- Describe your experience with event-driven architecture, message brokers, or async job processing. Please include tools used such as RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, Bull, or similar.
- Have you built or maintained payment, fintech, identity, KYC/KYB, blockchain, or other high-trust systems in production? If yes, describe the system and your role.
- This is a Staff-level individual contributor role with no direct reports. Please describe how you have led through architecture, mentorship, standards, or influence without direct management authority.
- Describe a backend platform, microservices system, or production architecture you owned or helped lead. What was your role, what technologies were used, and what impact did your work have?
- Tell us about a time you inherited a production codebase with significant technical debt, low test coverage, or reliability issues. What did you prioritize first and why?
Experience:
- AWS: 3 years (Required)
- Kubernetes, Docker, or EKS: 2 years (Required)
- microservices or distributed systems: 3 years (Required)
- Back-end development: 8 years (Required)
- TypeScript / Node.js: 4 years (Required)
- NestJS: 2 years (Required)
Work Location: Remote
