Staff Backend Engineer

About Cari

The Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system powering real-time, 24/7 movement of digital money across the traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. A pre-launch startup, we're creating an entirely new category of financial infrastructure that brings cash on chain through tokenization while powering the full spectrum of payments for our network - banks and most importantly, the customers they serve.

About the Role

You'll set technical direction for the platform infrastructure that our Banking and Blockchain engineering teams both build on-durable workflow orchestration, transaction-ordering guarantees, and the shared architectural patterns that keep two fast-moving product teams from quietly reinventing the same infrastructure twice. This is a cross-team role: your decisions constrain and enable how both teams design their own services.

You'll have deep expertise in at least one area the org draws on-most likely distributed transaction ordering, durable workflow systems, or data-consistency guarantees for financial flows-and you'll be the person other senior and staff engineers escalate to when a cross-service design question doesn't have an obvious owner.

What You'll Do

• Set the technical direction for cross-cutting backend platform infrastructure: durable workflow orchestration (Restate), transaction-ordering and concurrency-control patterns, and the shared primitives Banking and Blockchain services build on

• Design systems that span multiple services-data flow across the platform, migration strategies for live systems, and versioning strategy for shared infrastructure APIs

• Establish reliability standards that apply across services, not just your own: load testing profiles, deployment safety gates, and the failure-mode analysis that should happen before launch, not after

• Multiply the team's impact through systems, not just review: build the tooling, templates, and enforced standards (shared CI patterns, reusable service scaffolding, common observability conventions) that reduce process overhead org-wide

• Align multiple engineering teams on shared technical direction-this means building consensus, not just publishing a decision

• Represent backend platform engineering in cross-org technical planning, and flag architectural risk before it becomes another team's incident

Qualifications

• 8-10+ years of backend software engineering experience, including a track record of setting technical direction across multiple services or teams, not just owning your own

• Deep expertise in at least one of: durable workflow/orchestration systems, distributed transaction ordering, or data-consistency guarantees in financial or otherwise correctness-critical systems

• Strong proficiency in TypeScript; production experience with Effect (effect.ts) or a comparable functional effect system strongly preferred

• Experience designing systems that other teams build on top of-you understand what makes a shared platform component genuinely reusable versus just reused

• Track record of driving cross-team technical alignment without formal authority over the teams you're aligning

• Strong instincts around financial-grade reliability: idempotency, at-least-once delivery, crash recovery, and reconciliation, at a scale spanning multiple services

• Comfortable identifying and naming architectural risk before it's anyone's incident

Nice to Haves

• Prior work in fintech, payments, or another regulated financial infrastructure environment, ideally at meaningful transaction scale

• Experience with blockchain or custody-adjacent transaction systems

• Track record of building internal platform tooling or standards adopted org-wide

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary, bonus, and equity

• Full medical, vision, dental benefits

• 401(k) with company matching

• Flexible PTO in a remote-first environment

• Opportunity to shape a market-defining protocol with an experienced founding team

Security Responsibilities

Applies to all Cari employees

• Comply with all Cari information security policies, including the Acceptable Use Policy, and complete required security awareness training.

• Protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Cari systems and data, including bank-partner and customer information, consistent with least-privilege access principles.