Senior Software Engineer (Backend, TypeScript / Node.js, React)

The Role

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer with a strong backend background who is comfortable working in a product-driven environment with changing priorities and a high level of ownership.

This is a backend-first role (~70%) with occasional frontend tasks (~30%) when features require touching UI or integrating SDKs. Success in this role means not only writing code, but owning the technical side of things end-to-end: shaping technical solutions under uncertainty, taking responsibility for system behavior in production, long-term platform evolution and helping the team grow.

You will work closely with Product Managers, Engineering Manager, and other senior engineers, contributing to technical decisions and improving how we build and run our platform.

What You’ll Do

Backend & Platform Development

• Design and implement backend-heavy features using TypeScript and Node.js
• Build and evolve REST APIs, focusing on correctness, consistency and clear boundaries between services
• Work with SQL (PostgreSQL): data modeling, migrations, and consistency guarantees
• Participate in tech spikes: explore unclear problems and turn them into concrete technical plans
• Take full ownership of one or more services - from requirements and implementation to production support
• Help drive integration work with external partners (vendors, clients) when needed

Reliability & Production Ownership

• Work with production systems: investigate incidents, debug API failures, analyze data issues
• Improve observability: logs, metrics, visibility into system behavior
• Identify weak spots in reliability, performance or monitoring and propose improvements
• Apply reliability patterns: timeouts, retries, idempotency, graceful degradation
• Handle incidents responsibly and help improve processes to prevent problems to occur again

Collaboration

• Collaborate with Product and EM to clarify requirements and reduce ambiguity early
• Contribute to technical discussions, raise risks, explain trade-offs and propose balanced solutions
• Review code and mentor mid-level engineers
• Share knowledge via pairing, documentation and internal discussions
• Help improve engineering practices: testing, code quality, reliability patterns

Frontend (as needed)

• Contribute to React code when features require UI updates or customer-facing flows
• Work with API-driven UIs and third-party SDK integrations

Required Experience & Skills

• 4+ years of professional software development experience
• Strong backend expertise with TypeScript and Node.js
• Real production experience: incidents, debugging, API failures, data issues
• Experience owning a service end-to-end: from requirements to production support
• Clear product level architectural thinking:
  • well-designed APIs
  • correct data boundaries
  • proper error handling
  • ability to reason about trade-offs
• Understanding of microservice architectures and platform-level interactions
• Strong knowledge of HTTP APIs, SQL data modeling, and common failure modes
• Ability to work with ambiguity: ask the right questions and structure unclear problems
• Comfortable collaborating with Product, EM and other stakeholders
• English level B2+, written and spoken

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, high-load or high-reliability systems
• Practical understanding of reliability patterns: retries, timeouts, idempotency, fallback strategies
• Experience with queues or messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, BullMQ, etc.)
• Experience with Redis or other key-value stores
• Familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes (user-level understanding is enough)
• Basic understanding of AWS capabilities
• Experience with React (UI tasks, integrations, SDKs)
• Understanding of blockchain / Web3 fundamentals
• Experience with AI development tools (Copilot, Claude Code, etc)

Soft Skills we value

• Strong ownership mindset - ready to take responsibility for a system area
• Product thinking: understands how technical decisions impact users and business
• Mentorship: helps mid-level engineers grow through feedback and example
• Clear and transparent communication
• Active participation in technical discussions
• Ability to work independently without overly detailed technical specs
• Team-oriented and collaborative approach

Reporting

• Reports to the Engineering Manager
• No direct people management responsibilities

Compensation & Benefits

We believe great engineering requires a supportive environment:

• Competitive compensation
• Equity and performance-based bonuses, depending on role and contribution
• Paid time off
• Learning and growth opportunities
• Remote-first work setup
• Strong engineering culture focused on quality and reliability
• Yearly company offsites
• Company-provided equipment (laptop and necessary hardware)

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About Cyclops

Cyclops is the only crypto and stablecoin infrastructure provider exclusively focused on payments. Historically, crypto and stablecoin payments have been unnecessarily difficult. With Cyclops, the era of delays and complexity is over.

We are serial entrepreneurs. We founded The Giving Block in 2018, sold it to Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) in 2022, then spent the last 4 years building out the Shift4 crypto team and products. Now, we’re running things back and following a similar playbook. This time we’re more prepared and backed by the best in the industry (Castle Island, Fidelity, and Shift4).

Cyclops Culture

Don’t join Cyclops if you’re looking for a typical 9-5. The culture we’ve built is one of first-principles thinking and relentless execution. We wake up every day excited to deliver great products worthy of the world’s best companies. Everyone who works at Cyclops must have a founder mindset, where no problem is too big to solve.