Core Engine, Senior Backend Engineer

About Uphold

Uphold is a financial technology company that believes on-chain services are the future of finance. It provides modern infrastructure for on-chain payments, banking and investments. Offering Consumer Services, Business Services and Institutional Trading, Uphold makes pioneering financial services easy and trusted for millions of customers in more than 140 countries.

Uphold integrates with more than 30 trading venues, including centralized and decentralized exchanges, to deliver superior liquidity and optimal execution. Uphold never loans out customer assets and is always 100% reserved. The company pioneered radical transparency and uniquely publishes its assets and liabilities every 30 seconds on a public website (https://uphold.com/en-us/transparency).

Uphold strips away the complexity and lack of transparency to open up Web3 finance for everyone.

To learn more about Uphold, please visit https://uphold.com.

Job Summary

Most backend roles are about shipping features on top of existing infrastructure. This one is different.

Core Engine is Uphold's ground-up rebuild of the transaction engine that powers financial operations for millions of customers across 140+ countries. We are replacing a 10+ year-old backend with a modern double-entry ledger built on TigerBeetle, PostgreSQL, and Go - and migrating the entire transaction history to it, live, without disrupting production.

It is the most consequential engineering project happening at Uphold right now. If financial correctness, distributed systems, and systems that genuinely cannot be wrong are what you care about, this is the room to be in.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Design and implement financial workflows across the full ledger system: account management, transaction processing, settlement, and legacy migration
• Build double-entry accounting logic where correctness is non-negotiable - every debit has a credit, every record is permanent by design
• Work with TigerBeetle, a purpose-built high-performance financial ledger database and one of the more interesting pieces of infrastructure in fintech right now
• Use Temporal for durable, fault-tolerant financial workflows that must complete exactly once, even across failures
• Define and maintain gRPC service contracts that other internal systems depend on
• Contribute to the live migration of millions of legacy transactions into the new system - one of the harder problems in software: changing the engine while the car is moving
• Write tests that prove financial correctness, not just exercise code paths
• Other duties and responsibilities as reasonably required or assigned by the line manager

Required Qualifications and Skills

• 7+ years of experience in the field but we care more about how you think than how long you've been doing it
• Solid production Go experience and strong opinions about when simplicity beats cleverness
• Understanding of distributed systems well enough to reason about failure modes, not just the happy path
• Comfortable with relational databases - you know what a query plan looks like
• Experience working on systems where a bug has real consequences - financial, infrastructure, medical, or similar
• You think about edge cases before you write the code, not after the incident
• Fluent written and oral English

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with financial systems, double-entry bookkeeping, or payment processing
• Experience with Temporal, Cadence, or another workflow orchestration system in production
• Large-scale database migrations without downtime
• TigerBeetle - if you already know what it is, we want to talk
• Fluency in cryptocurrencies or other digital assets as they are core to our business
• Open source contributions, conference talks, or writing about your craft

What We Offer

• Innovation and Impact: Contribute to pioneering projects in a dynamic and challenging environment.
• Competitive Compensation: Performance bonuses, and comprehensive benefits on top of a competitive salary.
• Strong Company Culture: Thrive in a supportive, collegiate environment with values of integrity, teamwork, accountability, and excellence.
• Global Collaboration: Participate in regular updates, strategy sessions, and networking opportunities across the group.
• Development Opportunities: Access training and mentorship programs.
• Flexibility: Enjoy options to work from home, other locations, or adjust your hours.
• Inclusive Environment: Value and respect diverse perspectives.

Our Benefits

• Annual bonus program based on individual, team and company performance.
• Generous PTO, healthcare, and employee assistance programs.
• Engaging events and celebrations.
• Well-stocked office kitchen with a foodie culture.

Join us to grow, innovate, and contribute meaningfully. Be part of our talented team!

Visit our careers page for more exciting opportunities, if this role isn't the perfect fit.

EEOC Employer

We're proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and we celebrate our employees' differences, including race, color, religion, gender identity, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, and any other protected classes. Difference makes us stronger and better - together.