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Role Description

This Senior Backend Engineer role is essential to building and scaling the core Palette Labs platform from early foundations to a robust, production-grade system.

• Own the design, development, and reliability of backend services that serve as nodes in our protocol or participants in it.
• Focus on building well-architected web services, REST APIs, and foundational data systems that power applications and partner integrations.
• Partner closely with the founders and product team to define long-term backend architecture, establish engineering best practices, and lay the groundwork for scale.
• Success will be measured by the quality, reliability, and extensibility of the services built, and the ability to drive major technical milestones in the first 6–12 months.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade web services and REST APIs from first principles.
• Architect clean, maintainable service boundaries, data models, and internal interfaces.
• Own backend systems end-to-end — from schema design to deployment and production reliability.
• Implement best practices around transactional consistency, concurrency, and fault tolerance.
• Establish observability standards (metrics, tracing, logging), SLOs, and operational playbooks.
• Lead technical execution across major initiatives, ensuring systems are extensible and scalable.
• Partner with product to translate ambiguous requirements into clean backend abstractions.
• Raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing strategy, and long-term maintainability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, with a strong track record of shipping production systems.
• Significant experience building and operating web services and RESTful APIs.
• Experience in startup or early-stage environments where you’ve built systems 0→1.
• Deep understanding of backend architecture fundamentals: service design, data modeling, API design, and distributed systems basics.
• Strong experience with databases (schema design, indexing, query optimization, safe migrations).
• Experience owning systems in production (observability, incident response, performance tuning).
• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (e.g., Rust, Go, TypeScript/Node, Java, C#, Python) and comfort learning new ones.

Requirements

• Production experience with Rust.
• Experience designing service-oriented or microservice architectures.
• Familiarity with event-driven systems (queues, pub/sub, async processing).
• Experience working in high-transaction or financially sensitive systems.
• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containers, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong product intuition and ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous environments.

Benefits

• A competitive annual salary, commensurate with your experience and industry standards.
• Eligible for our company semi-annual performance bonus, which is tied directly to individual achievements.
• We offer stock options to all full-time employees, allowing you to share directly in the company's success and long-term growth.
• 100% employer‑covered premium options for Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for employees.
• Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy.