Backend Engineer

About the Role

We're looking for backend engineers to design and scale the systems that drive Sentient's internal and community-facing products. In this role, you'll architect and maintain the services and infrastructure that power the foundation, from large-scale distributed systems and databases to APIs and data pipelines. You'll collaborate closely with research, product, and operations to bring new capabilities to production while ensuring performance, safety, and compliance at global scale. Trading dashboards, exchange integrations, and treasury tooling (Safe multi-sig, Fireblocks / Anchorage) are an early, high-leverage surface. Scope extends across everything the foundation runs.

In This Role, You Will

• Own the end-to-end development lifecycle for new platform capabilities and integrations with other systems.
• Design, build, and operate services, APIs, and data pipelines that are reliable, observable, and secure by default.
• Collaborate closely with product, research, operations, and external partners to understand problems and implement effective solutions.
• Work with the research team to support and operationalize next-generation models and agents.
• Take on cross-cutting projects as they arise — from trading and treasury infra to internal tools, developer APIs, and community-facing products.
• Design and build a dashboard system to visualize portfolio performance, NAV, PnL, and risk metrics for tracking portfolio NAV, exposures, and key financial metrics.

Your Background Might Look Like

• 3–5+ years of professional engineering experience (excluding internships) in relevant roles at tech and product-driven companies.
• Former founder, or early engineer at a startup who has built a product from scratch, is a plus.
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, or similar) and distributed systems concepts.
• Enjoy building infrastructure that supports high-throughput systems and large volumes of data.
• Care deeply about reliability, safety, security, and performance in production environments.
• Interest in AI. Direct experience is not required.
• Proven ability to thrive in fast-growing, product-driven companies by effectively navigating loosely defined tasks and managing competing priorities or deadlines.
• Strong product sense. You can take a loosely defined problem, talk to stakeholders, and come back with a scoped solution — not just a ticket list.
• Fluent with AI coding tools. You've shipped real code with Claude Code, Cursor, or similar, and have opinions on how to get the most out of them — prompting, context, verification, and knowing where they break down.

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