Senior Software Engineer, C++
Stellar is an open-source blockchain network designed to facilitate fast, low-cost cross-border payments and financial transactions globally.
Funding
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About Stellar
Stellar is an open-source blockchain network focused on improving global financial access by enabling fast, secure, and low-cost cross-border transactions. It connects financial institutions, payment systems, and individuals to transfer digital and fiat assets. With a mission to promote financial inclusion, Stellar is designed to serve both developed and underserved markets, offering interoperability between traditional and blockchain-based financial systems.
Skills
About the Role
You'll be at the heart of it all—designing and evolving Stellar Core, the distributed engine powering the global ledger and consensus. This is your chance to work on real-world, high-impact distributed systems that are actively used by developers, institutions, and builders around the world. You'll tackle complex, meaningful challenges that push the boundaries of what's possible in blockchain—boosting performance, strengthening decentralization, and designing incentive mechanisms that drive long-term network health. Whether you're optimizing peer-to-peer networking, building resilience against coordinated attacks, or simulating consensus models to validate security and scalability, you'll be doing it all. If you're excited by formal verification, simulations, distributed systems, and multi-core performance, you'll help shape the foundation of an open financial future.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience developing software on a team
- BS or MS in Computer Science or equivalent field
- Excel in writing code in modern C++ or Rust in a production environment
- Great communicator that can advocate and lead technical discussions, especially during design and code review
- Solid understanding of software design patterns, and how to build reusable, extensible, and modular components
- Knowledgeable of best practices and development tools
- Passion for performance debugging and benchmarking
- Enthusiastic about working on a small, growing team with a lot of autonomy
- Direct experience with designing and implementing distributed systems (bonus)
- Strong curiosity in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies (bonus)
Responsibilities
- Design and build key components of Stellar Core, the backbone software behind the Stellar Network
- Design and develop robust, scalable, and extensible technologies that empower developers and network participants
- Collaborate on new architectures and subsystems with the CTO, the engineering team, and the open source community
- Write clean, maintainable code with an emphasis on edge case analysis and future-proofing
- Own core subsystems of Stellar Core and help the team hit critical product milestones
- Collaborate with the team on code review and design, and contribute to best practices for engineering at SDF
- Investigate and refactor performance bottlenecks to continue scaling the system
- Author detailed technical feature and protocol (RFC) specifications
Benefits
- Competitive health, dental & vision coverage with most plans covered at 100% for the employee + any dependents
- Flexible time off + 15 company holidays including a company-wide holiday break
- Generous paid parental leave for all parents, plus paid pregnancy disability leave for birthing parents
- Gym reimbursement ($80 per month)
- Life & AD&D (up to $50K)
- Short & Long term disability
- 401K with 4% match
- Health & Dependent Care FSA Accounts
- Commuter benefits with $250/month employer contribution
- Health Savings Account (HSA) with monthly employer contribution
- Family building benefits through Kindbody
- Wellbeing benefits (One Medical, Rightway, Headspace)
- L&D budget of $1,500/year
- Daily lunch and snacks in office
- Company retreats
- Lumen-denominated grants
