Senior Backend Engineer at Hive Labs

The Role

We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to own and evolve the core backend systems that power:

Protocol and pool indexing
Portfolio and allocation logic
Execution planning and transaction orchestration
Safety, constraints, and failure handling

You’ll be working closely with the founder (product/system design) and will have real ownership over architecture and technical decisions.

This is not a CRUD role. It is a decision + execution system.

What You’ll Work On

Design and implement backend services that:
- Ingest and normalize on-chain protocol data (pools, yields, constraints)
- Represent pools, allocations, and execution plans as deterministic data structures
Build allocation and constraint logic (risk caps, concentration limits, eligibility filters)
Own execution planning:
- Swaps, deposits, sequencing
- Batching vs multi-tx flows
- Simulation and preflight checks
Implement robust failure handling:
- Partial execution
- Slippage errors
- Protocol unavailability
Collaborate on agent boundaries:
- What is deterministic vs flexible
- What the system is allowed vs forbidden to do
Help shape monitoring and post-execution state tracking

What We’re Looking For

Required

5+ years of backend engineering experience
Strong system design instincts (you think in invariants, edge cases, failure modes)
Experience building production systems that interact with external, unreliable dependencies
Comfort working in ambiguous, early-stage environments
Strong opinions, weakly held

Strong Plus

Experience with blockchain or DeFi systems (Solana preferred)
Experience with financial systems, trading, or risk-sensitive software
Familiarity with transaction orchestration, batching, or execution pipelines
Experience designing schemas and APIs that must remain stable over time

AI Scope

AI is used to interpret user intent and generate explanations - not to predict markets or autonomously move funds. You’ll help define clear interfaces and guardrails between AI outputs and backend execution logic.

What This Is Not

Not a growth-hacking role
Not a UI-heavy role
Not “just integrate APIs”
Not a hype-driven AI project

If you enjoy thinking about what must never happen as much as what should happen, you’ll like this role.

How We Work

Non-custodial, safety-first mindset
Product clarity > feature velocity
Explicit constraints and contracts
Honest communication about what’s unfinished
Small team, high trust, real ownership

The founder does not code and is very intentional about hiring senior engineers who care about correctness, architecture, and long-term product integrity.

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