Senior Software Engineer, Technical Leadership / Platform (Remote)

Cyclops, a stablecoin infrastructure platform for payments companies that closed a $20M Series A in mid-2026, is hiring a senior engineer to take architectural ownership of its platform's reliability and scalability. The role is about 30-50% architecture-focused while staying hands-on, with direct responsibility for the highest-risk backend components.

The engineer will act as the internal authority on system design, flagging scaling limits and failure points before they hit production, and will also serve as the primary technical point of contact for third-party API and SDK integration partners. Because the platform moves real customer funds, a large part of the role is about reliability engineering: retries, timeouts, idempotency, graceful degradation, and strong observability.

This is a contractor engagement rather than direct employment, requiring meaningful production experience with systems that actually move money (custody, wallets, payments, or settlement), not just consuming a crypto API from the outside.

• Design and evolve core platform services with a focus on reliability, data integrity, and clear service boundaries
• Identify architectural risk and scaling limits before they become production incidents, and propose pragmatic migration paths
• Act as the primary technical point of contact for partner integrations, including solution reviews and documentation
• Design reliability mechanisms such as retries, timeouts, idempotency, and graceful degraded modes
• Drive observability improvements and participate in production incident response and postmortems
• Build proofs-of-concept during project discovery and validate third-party vendor integration approaches
• Implement the highest-risk backend components directly in TypeScript and Node.js

• 6+ years of professional backend development experience
• Hands-on production experience building crypto infrastructure that moves real funds (custody, wallets, exchange, payments, or settlement)
• Strong backend expertise in TypeScript and Node.js
• Deep experience with distributed system design: microservices, service boundaries, REST APIs, and asynchronous messaging
• Strong SQL/PostgreSQL knowledge and a reliability-first mindset for handling failure scenarios
• Comfortable using AI coding tools daily while critically reviewing their output

This is a contractor engagement rather than direct employment at a fast-growing, well-capitalized stablecoin infrastructure startup, and the role carries unusually broad architectural authority for a contract position given its direct responsibility for systems moving live customer funds.