Backend Engineer, Privy
- Your ability to inspire and collaborate makes you effective at leading cross-team initiatives and aligning people.
- You excel at understanding developer needs, which is essential since customers are developers.
- Your communication skills ensure clear documentation and knowledge sharing across the team.
- The fast, iterative pace can feel chaotic and may clash with your desire for structured, harmonious work.
- You may find the highly technical, systems-focused work less fulfilling, craving more people-facing interaction.
Who we are
About Privy
Our mission is to make privacy and user ownership the default online. To do so, we build simple, flexible APIs and tools for developers that make it easy to build new products on crypto rails.
Privy owns the abstractions and infrastructure layer above wallets, integrating across chains, third-party providers, and Stripe products like Treasury and Link. We get to solve hard technical problems while leveraging Stripe's distribution to reach customers like Ramp, Klarna, Deel, Kraken, Hyperliquid, and Fomo — powering experiences for both mainstream users and crypto natives.
Learn more about Privy: Privy and Stripe: Bringing crypto to everyone
About the team
Engineering at Privy is distinguished by:
- High urgency: Shipping very small iterations, very fast, to learn very quickly.
- Product taste: Our customers are developers, and to build effective products for them requires technical knowledge - you will often be "the PM".
- Security mindset: A great portion of our product is trust. While we have a dedicated security team, every engineer brings security to their designs from the start.
In practice, we use boring technology like Node, React, and AWS so we can focus our engineering energy entirely on pushing the boundaries of Privy's core product, e.g. through hardware enclaves, multi-region low latency APIs, and blockchain abstractions that are accessible to mainstream developers.
What you'll do
- Design and build the backend systems that power wallets, identity, and onchain infrastructure at scale
- Create platform primitives and APIs that enable teams across Privy and Stripe to build faster
- Lead complex technical initiatives across architecture, data, and distributed systems
- Improve the scalability, reliability, and performance of our core platform
- Help shape our technical direction through high-leverage engineering work
Who you are
Minimum requirements
- 8+ years of experience building and maintaining a production system at scale
- An understanding of modern API development best practices and design
- Experience in building data models, managing database migrations and best practices, and infrastructure configuration
- An ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment
- A growth mindset, a constant curiosity, and fearlessness to dive into the unknown
- An ability to write maintainable, well-tested, modular code, but also be pragmatic about moving fast
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical documentation
Preferred qualifications
- Experience in an API-driven business within payments, fintech, or crypto
- Built or contributed to open-source developer tooling
- Published work (open source code, talks, blog posts, etc.)
- Experience working with blockchain protocols and designing or interacting with smart contracts
- Experience in authentication, identity, or security
Best personality fits for this role
Your strategic mindset lets you design scalable backend systems, matching the role's focus on architecture and performance.
Read the INTJ career guide →Your natural leadership and vision make you effective at leading complex technical initiatives and shaping technical direction.
Read the ENTJ career guide →Your knack for abstract thinking suits designing blockchain abstractions and complex distributed systems.
Read the INTP career guide →