Senior Staff Software Engineer
Ethena is a DeFi protocol enabling the creation of USDe, a synthetic dollar, and offering internet-native yield through staking.
Maintainer signals as of 8/12/2026
Funding history
About Ethena
Ethena is a decentralized finance protocol that allows users to mint USDe, a synthetic dollar, using liquid staking tokens as collateral. The platform also offers staking of USDe to earn yield in the form of sUSDe. Ethena aims to provide a stable, high-yield asset for the crypto ecosystem, combining the stability of a dollar-pegged token with the benefits of decentralized finance.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You own the backend systems and money paths for payments, payouts, deposits, transfers, and reconciliation. You design secure app-facing APIs and authentication services, integrate financial providers, trace on-chain settlement, and establish testing, documentation, correctness, and security standards for backend development.
Requirements
- Build and operate production backend systems that move real money
- Design client-facing APIs for mobile applications at scale
- Know API contracts, versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency keys, error models, pagination, and rate limiting
- Build authentication and authorization backends
- Know OAuth2, OIDC, JWT, RBAC, ABAC, MFA, and step-up authentication
- Integrate financial third parties and handle webhooks and reconciliation
- Understand on-chain settlement, nonces, gas, reorgs, RPC failures, and confirmation depth
- Use TypeScript or transition credibly from Go, Kotlin, Rust, or Java
- Use Postgres, event or queue systems, and gRPC
- Practice test-first, behavior-driven, and integration testing
- Use agentic development workflows
Responsibilities
- Design and build backend systems for a high-usage consumer app
- Own versioned and backward-compatible app-facing API contracts
- Implement client idempotency keys, error models, and pagination
- Own authentication and authorization services
- Implement passkey and WebAuthn relying-party functionality
- Manage session and token lifecycles
- Enforce authorization at every API boundary
- Defend authentication services with rate limiting and anomaly detection
- Securely handle PII and secrets
- Set backend patterns, tests, and documentation
- Trace money paths through APIs, wallets, execution, indexing, event streams, and settlement
- Deliver test-first implementations of payment paths
