Principal Engineer, CTO Office

At Utila, we build the enterprise-grade platform that more than 400 companies run their digital asset operations on. Our technology secures $30B+ in monthly transaction volume and has facilitated over $500B in transactions to date. We're backed by $50M+ in funding, and our customer base is growing fast.

The systems we build are mission-critical, so we hold them to the highest standards: precise, secure, and reliable. If you want to own hard problems end to end, work alongside people who raise the bar, and leave your mark on the future of financial technology, you'll feel at home here.

How we work

At Utila, We Own It. We look beyond individual tasks and requirements to understand the bigger picture - our customers, our product, and the systems we build.

We take ownership end to end: from identifying the real problem and challenging assumptions to designing, implementing, and operating the solution.

Security, correctness, and reliability are fundamental when you're protecting financial assets. But so are simplicity, developer experience, and the ability to move quickly without compromising the guarantees our customers depend on.

We value engineers who think independently, challenge existing approaches - including their own - and take pride in turning difficult problems into elegant, working solutions.

The role

You'll help shape the architecture, security, and technical foundations of a platform that financial institutions, fintechs, and enterprises use to manage digital assets, orchestrate transactions, and enforce authorization policies built on MPC and advanced cryptography.

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role, working directly with our CTO and engineering leadership.

You'll have the autonomy to identify high-impact engineering problems, challenge existing designs, research alternatives, and drive solutions across teams. You'll tackle some of our hardest technical challenges - from complex distributed systems and core product architecture to infrastructure security and critical trust boundaries.

We expect you to go beyond recommendations and design documents: prototype solutions, write production code, and drive initiatives through implementation and operation.

This isn't a traditional security role focused on compliance, vulnerability scanning, or audits. Nor is it a purely architectural position detached from implementation.

We're looking for someone who can think deeply, challenge assumptions, and turn complex technical problems into working systems.

Responsibilities

What you'll lead

• Critical architecture decisions: Design and evolve technically complex systems across our platform, including backend services, APIs, distributed systems, and data infrastructure. Take initiatives from initial design through implementation and operation.
• Core product engineering: Tackle challenging technical problems across our product, from transaction processing and blockchain integrations to distributed systems, data architecture, and scalability. Bring architectural depth to problems where the right solution isn't obvious.
• Hard problems, solved for the long term: Identify architectural weaknesses, challenge assumptions, research alternatives and emerging technologies, and turn what you learn into pragmatic, production-ready systems.
• Security by design: Build systems that preserve critical security guarantees even when individual components or trust boundaries are compromised. Strengthen transaction authorization, signing workflows, identity, access control, and security-sensitive architecture.
• Hardened infrastructure: Strengthen the security of our cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, software supply chain, and production environments. Reduce reliance on privileged systems and limit the impact of compromised credentials and infrastructure.
• Tooling that pays twice: Build tooling, automation, and reusable infrastructure that improve security, reliability, and developer productivity. Work with our cryptography, DevOps, and security teams to turn engineering principles into practical controls.
• Hands-on delivery: Design, prototype, and implement critical components yourself. Investigate complex issues across application, infrastructure, and security boundaries, and drive initiatives into production, either directly or by collaborating with and leading other engineers.
• A higher engineering bar: Act as a technical thought partner to the CTO, engineering directors, and tech leads. Mentor senior engineers, help teams make better technical decisions independently, and introduce engineering practices and AI-assisted workflows that improve quality and velocity.

Problems you might take on

• Secure software delivery: Design an independently verifiable software supply chain that limits the impact of compromised development infrastructure or CI/CD systems, while preserving a great developer experience.
• End-to-end transaction security: Design mechanisms that cryptographically bind customer authorization to intended blockchain transactions, minimizing the trust required in backend services.
• Infrastructure security: Strengthen isolation, identity management, attestation, and authorization across cloud infrastructure and production environments.
• Core platform architecture: Solve complex engineering challenges involving distributed systems, transaction processing, data consistency, scalability, and the evolution of our core platform.
• Engineering automation: Build tools and infrastructure that eliminate recurring engineering work, improve correctness, and enable teams to move faster without sacrificing reliability or security.

Requirements

What you bring

• Extensive hands-on experience designing and building complex production software systems, with excellent programming skills and a record of significant technical contributions.
• Deep understanding of backend engineering, distributed systems, and software architecture.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, system security, identity, authentication, or authorization.
• A strong security mindset. You reason about threat models, trust boundaries, attack surfaces, and failure scenarios, and you ask which assumptions a system relies on and what happens when they fail.
• The ability to reason across application code, infrastructure, security boundaries, and operational systems, including understanding where specialized expertise is required.
• A track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams without formal managerial authority, from initial research and design through production.
• Strong independent research and problem-solving skills, with the ability to quickly develop deep expertise in unfamiliar technical domains.
• Sound engineering judgment to balance security, correctness, performance, maintainability, and developer productivity.
• Clear communication skills and the confidence to challenge technical decisions constructively, including those made by senior leadership.
• A genuine passion for hands-on engineering and the desire to continue building, not just designing systems.

Nice to have

• Go, Rust, C++, or other systems/backend programming languages.
• GCP, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or cloud-native architectures.
• Software supply-chain security, workload identity, artifact signing, attestation, or secure CI/CD.
• Experience designing secure financial, identity, authentication, or authorization systems.
• Familiarity with cryptographic protocols, MPC, HSMs, TEEs, or confidential computing.
• Blockchain infrastructure or digital asset systems.
• Internal developer platforms, security automation, or infrastructure tooling.
• Previous experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or technical architect in a highly technical organization.

You don't need to have worked in a dedicated security role. We're especially interested in exceptional software engineers who have developed deep security expertise through building and operating critical systems.

Preferred Qualifications

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Why This Role?

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Why Join Us?

Where we build

Hybrid: 4 days a week from our Tel Aviv office, with an on-site gym, a dog-friendly office, and dedicated parking.

Own the problem. Build the solution. Make your mark.

What We Offer?

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