Senior Software Engineer (Technical Leadership / Platform)

The Role

This is a Senior Software Engineer role with a Technical Leadership/Platform specialization. The role focused on system design, reliability, and long-term platform evolution. We have API/SDK integrations with 3rd party vendors and our clients; this role acts as a technical representative during and after the integration.

You will help the team understand how our systems should behave under load, during failures, and as they scale, ensuring the platform foundation remains healthy over time.

The role involves a significant architectural focus (30–50%), while remaining fully hands-on. You will take ownership of the most complex or high-risk backend work when needed. 

You will not write frontend code, but you should clearly understand frontend–backend boundaries and how they influence system and API design.

What You’ll Do

Platform Architecture & Evolution

• Design and evolve core platform services, focusing on reliability, data integrity, and clear service boundaries along with business requirements
• Identify architectural risks, scalability limits, and weak points before they become production issues
• Recognize when existing tools (queues, storage, frameworks) are reaching their limits
• Propose pragmatic, incremental improvement or migration paths

Partner Technical Relationship & Communication

• Own the technical relationship with partners, acting as the primary technical point of contact
• Lead technical discussions with partners, including solution reviews, troubleshooting, and roadmap alignment from technical perspective
• Document technical decisions, integration details, and changes in scope or behavior
• Ensure partners understand expectations, timelines, and technical constraints

Reliability improvements

• Design and improve mechanisms for:
  • retries and backoff
  • timeouts and idempotency
  • handling partial failures
  • degraded and fallback modes
• Drive improvements in observability: metrics, logs, tracing, and operational visibility
• Participate in production incident analysis and reliability improvements over time

Backend Implementation

• Contribute during Discovery stage of projects: build PoCs, help validate ideas, analyze 3rd party vendor APIs and proposed integration flows
• Own integrations with external partners and ensure correctness under partial failure scenarios
• Contribute to the design and evolution of REST APIs, contracts, and error handling
• Implement the most complex and high-risk backend components using TypeScript and Node.js

Technical Leadership

• Perform thoughtful code reviews
• Help senior and mid-level engineers decompose large or ambiguous problems into actionable steps
• Raise the overall technical maturity of the team, including senior engineers
• Share system design knowledge through pairing, documentation, and internal discussions

Collaboration

• Work closely with Product Managers and Engineering Manager early in the design process
• Reduce ambiguity through communication and structured technical thinking
• Clearly explain architectural trade-offs and long-term consequences of decisions

Required Experience & Skills

• 6+ years of professional backend development experience
• Strong backend expertise in TypeScript and Node.js
• Hands-on production experience: incident response, debugging, API failures, data issues
• Experience owning services end-to-end, from design to production support
• Deep experience in distributed system design
• Strong understanding of:
  • microservices architecture
  • service boundaries and data models
  • REST APIs and API contracts
  • queues and asynchronous communication
• Excellent knowledge of SQL (PostgreSQL) and understanding of other storage types
• Strong reliability mindset and experience with failure scenarios
• Ability to evaluate trade-offs and propose practical solutions
• Experience improving observability and investigating production incidents
• Ability to mentor engineers, including senior-level
• Comfortable working with ambiguity and complex systems
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to bridge technical and business conversations
• English level B2+, written and spoken

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, crypto, payments, or other high-reliability domains
• Experience with AI development tools (Copilot, Claude Code, etc)
• Basic understanding of blockchain / Web3 concepts
• Experience with queues and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.)
• Redis or other in-memory data stores
• Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS (user-level understanding)

Reporting

• Reports to the Engineering Manager.
• This role does not include direct people management, only technical influence.

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.