OPEN ROLE
Founding Backend + API Engineer
San Fransisco/New York
View the interview process
About Axel
Axel builds developer infrastructure for the future of finance. We’re unlocking financial freedom for everyone, starting with the developer. As the leading universal and composable decentralized finance infrastructure platform, we’ve built the world class developer tooling needed to make building on the blockchain frictionless.
Developers and companies worldwide use Axel to build incredible applications and systems that leverage permissionless financial technologies — lending markets, yield protocols, staking, decentralized exchanges, and more. Our customers’ onboarding experience and home is through our web dashboard, where they use Axel to manage their API keys as well as instantiate, debug, monitor, and launch their apps.
Axel is extremely well funded from phenomenal investors and some of the brightest minds in technology, giving us many years of runway and the ability to provide significant equity, pay competitive salaries, and offer great benefits.
The Role
You do not need to have any blockchain, web3/crypto, or DeFi experience to work in this role at Axel — we uphold a culture of collaborative coaching and learning. We ensure you’re fully equipped with the skill set you need to excel in this space.
As a backend engineer at Axel, you will design and build platforms, APIs, and services that are configurable and scalable around the globe. You’ll dictate Axel’s roadmap and set the standard for clean, readable, and secure APIs backed by a comprehensive test suite.
Build the future of financial infrastructure. You’ll be building out Axel’s core non-custodial read/write API, which houses four API suites: lending, staking, exchanging, yield.
Architect simple solutions across complex systems. You’ll design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable and performant APIs, microservices, and systems.
Own products from beginning to end. You’ll create and own our best practices for backend application development, with a focus on reliability, low latency, scalability, and data correctness.
Play as a team. At Axel, engineering is a team sport. We believe a great team member is someone who does their best work, supports others, and loves giving and receiving feedback.
Obsess over your craft. You’ll be writing reliable, high coverage test cases for features you ship, debugging production issues across multiple levels of the stack.
Grow with the company. Proactively engage with the team to solicit feedback, recruit, and interview engineering candidates, fostering a culture of respect, velocity, and excellence.
About you
You would be a good fit if you have:
2-4 years of relevant industry experience, particularly in backend development
Background in Computer Science or a technically related field
Experience designing, building, and scaling developer-centric API products
Experience developing with Typescript (Node) and/or Rust
Experience with production distributed systems, web applications, and microservice architecture
Ability to debug and solve complex design, scaling, latency, or performance problems in high-throughput, low-latency systems
Experience in Docker, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP technologies, and/or the CI/CD pipeline is a plus!
Knowing how to find a genuine balance between perfection and shipping quickly
Passion for decentralized finance and blockchains is a plus!
A “can-do” hustler mentality, being a former founder, or building side projects is a huge plus!
The Team
Our current team is focused primarily on engineering and design. We believe the magic happens when we’re in person. Our headquarters are based in Silicon Valley with a presence in New York.
If you want to be IRL with the team, we can help you relocate or fly you to the HQ on a regular basis.
We're a small, scrappy team, and we value building a thoughtful and intentional company culture.
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