Staff Backend Engineer

About Us
OpenBlock is building the interoperability layer for verifiable data, powered by zero-knowledge proofs. Leading blockchain protocols rely on OpenBlock’s data feeds to allocate over $2 billion in annual spending.

We’ve raised $20M led by Electric Capital and Foundation Capital. Our team of 40+ draws experience from Stanford, a16z, Carnegie Mellon, Meta, Palantir, and other top-tier institutions.

Explore our work at www.openblocklabs.com.

Role Overview

As a Staff Backend Engineer at OpenBlock, you will architect, build, and scale the critical data pipelines behind our Universal Data Protocol. You’ll develop systems that bridge off-chain proving infrastructure, relayers, and smart contracts, ensuring the reliability, predictability, and testability of our backend services. You will take full ownership of our data ingestion processes—mapping complex, multi-tenant datasets into a Postgres-backed schema—and ensure our applications scale with a growing volume of high-fidelity data.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain data ingestion and querying pipelines, establishing robust and automated systems that feed verifiable data into off-chain and on-chain components.
• Own database schema design and data modeling for complex, multi-tenant environments, ensuring efficient querying, reliability, and scalability.
• Implement best practices for data-intensive workloads, including caching (Redis), queueing (RabbitMQ), and infrastructure as code (Ansible, Terraform).
• Guide backend architecture decisions, integrating with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) and containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders to deliver predictable, testable, and automatable services that support our core data protocols.
• Optimize large-scale data flows and ensure the system’s scalability and performance even under rapid growth.
• Integrate and maintain TypeScript-based services, leveraging ORMs for Postgres and deploying edge services via Cloudflare.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, including scaling data-intensive systems.
• Proven ability in data pipeline design, database modeling, and optimizing query performance.
• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, and modern ORMs.
• Experience working with multi-tenant, B2B/B2B2C products and large-scale architectures.
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS/GCP) and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Excellent English communication skills—both written and verbal.
• Track record of independent thinking, strong ownership, and delivering impactful results.

Bonus qualifications

• Experience with decentralized protocols and blockchain ecosystems.
• Strong expertise in Rust for performance-critical components.
• Knowledge of Cloudflare’s edge technologies, RabbitMQ, and advanced distributed systems design patterns.