Senior Backend Engineer

What you will do

• Design and build robust, high-throughput backend services supporting real-time risk scoring, screening, and continuous monitoring workflows.
• Work closely with data engineering teammates to deliver personalised intelligence to our customers, enabling unique, customer-specific views of the blockchain.
• Contribute to world-class sanctions reporting infrastructure that compliance teams and regulators depend on.
• Help scale the system to support Elliptic's growing enterprise customer base, identifying and resolving performance and reliability bottlenecks.
• Take ownership of technically complex areas, driving architecture and implementation decisions with sound trade-off reasoning.
• Review code, raise the technical quality of the team, and mentor engineers where appropriate.
• Collaborate with product, data, and engineering stakeholders to translate compliance requirements into well-designed, maintainable systems.

What you will achieve in the first 6 months

• Deliver meaningful contributions to the Real-time Risk platform, building confidence across the codebase and event-driven architecture.
• Demonstrate clear technical ownership of an area of the system, including participation in design decisions and code review.
• Have a strong understanding of how sanctions screening and continuous monitoring work end-to-end, and be able to articulate where the biggest engineering challenges and opportunities are.

You will be a great fit here if you

• Take joy from building solutions that solve real customer problems
• Enjoy working in domains where correctness matters, and where the systems you build are depended on by real customers in regulated industries.
• Have a love of data intensive applications and products
• Take a pragmatic approach to complexity, knowing when to simplify and when to invest in the right abstraction.

Our ideal candidate has

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems.
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js experience, with the ability to write clean, well-tested, production-ready code.
• Proven experience working with complex event-driven, streaming, or queue-backed architectures (e.g. Kinesis, Kafka, SQS, or similar) in a production environment.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems trade-offs: consistency, availability, latency, and failure modes.
• Experience working with NoSQL and caching technologies, with comfort reasoning about data access patterns and performance.
• A track record of contributing to technically complex codebases, and the ability to communicate architectural thinking clearly.
• AI fluency: you actively use AI tools to accelerate your work, and can demonstrate how you apply them effectively in engineering contexts.

Bonus Points for

• Experience with Java, Scala, or another multi-threaded, JVM-based language.
• Familiarity with Redis or similar in-memory data stores, particularly for caching and low-latency reads.
• Experience with EVM-compatible blockchains or crypto compliance domains.
• OpenSearch/Elasticsearch experience, particularly around index design and schema migrations.