TypeScript Backend Engineer
Startale Labs is a company that makes web3 infrastructure and public goods.
About Startale Labs
Startale Labs focuses on creating core infrastructure and applications for Web3, including dApps and infrastructure development. They conduct research and development in Web3 technologies and token economics, and provide incubation programs for Web3 startups to foster innovation and build an ecosystem around Startale Labs.
Skills
About the Role
You will take ownership of complex backend systems end-to-end, from designing APIs and backend services to building scalable data pipelines, managing databases, and integrating blockchain infrastructure. You'll operate production systems under real-world load, moving fluidly across the backend stack depending on what the product needs — one month building user-facing APIs, another designing blockchain indexers or optimizing database performance. You'll work closely with product, infrastructure, and protocol teams to build reliable systems that power seamless experiences across both traditional and blockchain-based applications, with a high degree of autonomy over critical infrastructure.
Requirements
- Extensive experience building and operating production backend systems in modern engineering environments
- Strong proficiency in TypeScript and modern backend frameworks (NestJS, Fastify, Express, or similar)
- Strong understanding of backend architecture, API design, service-oriented architecture, and distributed systems design
- Ability to independently design and deliver complex backend systems with minimal oversight
- Proven track record building and operating backend systems serving large numbers of users in production environments
- Experience designing systems that operate reliably under high traffic, heavy workloads, and demanding production conditions
- Strong understanding of performance optimization, scalability bottlenecks, concurrency, fault tolerance, and infrastructure reliability
- Experience operating systems where uptime, consistency, and reliability directly impact end users
- Strong operational mindset and experience handling production incidents and scaling challenges in live systems
- Deep expertise with PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing, query optimization, migrations, and production database management
- Experience building systems that process large amounts of structured or event-driven data
- Strong understanding of observability, logging, monitoring, and service health management
- Experience building backend systems for modern Web2 applications
- Experience integrating with blockchain infrastructure, node APIs, smart contracts, or decentralized protocols
- Familiarity with blockchain indexing systems, event processing pipelines, or other on-chain data infrastructure
- Good understanding of wallet architecture, transaction lifecycle, signing flows, and blockchain data models
- Familiarity with DeFi protocols and blockchain-based financial applications, either as a developer or an advanced user
- Experience building backend services in Go is a strong plus
- Experience with Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ, or similar messaging systems is a strong plus
- Experience with blockchain indexing frameworks such as The Graph, Subsquid, or custom indexers is a strong plus
- Experience deploying and operating services using Docker and modern CI/CD pipelines is a strong plus
- Contributions to open-source backend, infrastructure, or blockchain tooling projects is a strong plus
Responsibilities
- Take ownership of backend architecture and implementation across multiple products within the Startale ecosystem
- Design, build, and maintain scalable production APIs and backend services used by customer-facing applications
- Build and operate high-performance distributed systems capable of serving large user bases and handling significant production traffic reliably
- Design backend systems with strong focus on scalability, fault tolerance, reliability, and long-term maintainability
- Build and maintain data pipelines, background workers, asynchronous processing systems, and event-driven architectures
- Build and maintain blockchain integrations and indexing systems that ingest, process, and serve on-chain data to internal services and user-facing applications
- Design efficient database schemas, optimize complex queries, and ensure long-term scalability of data storage systems
- Work across both Web2 and Web3 backend infrastructure, integrating traditional backend systems with blockchain protocols and decentralized infrastructure
- Diagnose and solve complex production issues, performance bottlenecks, reliability problems, and scaling challenges
- Build systems with strong observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational tooling
- Continuously improve backend architecture, deployment pipelines, system reliability, and engineering practices
- Move quickly, make sound technical decisions independently, and take ownership of delivering production-ready systems
