Staff Software Engineer, Bitcoin Platform

Company Description

Founded in July 2021, TBD is one of Block's four business units, alongside Square, Cash App, and Tidal. At TBD, we believe in a decentralized future that returns ownership and control over your finances, data, and identity. Guided by this vision, TBD is building an open source platform and developer infrastructure that enables everyone to access and participate in the global economy.

TBD is inviting the world to join us in building and adopting open and decentralized technologies that solve real problems for real people — from next generation infrastructure that lowers the cost of global payments and enables frictionless commerce, to decentralized identity technologies that enable anyone to access and participate in the global economy. Our mission advances economic empowerment through the power of decentralized solutions, built open source and collaboratively.

The offerings we build will provide developers, institutions, and individuals with the capabilities needed to build the next wave of innovative apps and services, and access this decentralized future. We’re leveraging bitcoin and other decentralized technologies to reinvent the global financial system in an open and permissionless way to further Block’s mission of economic empowerment, with a global focus.

Job Description

The Bitcoin Platform team develops infrastructure for Block to send, receive and custody bitcoin by operating a stack for both cold, hot, and lightning wallets. Our goal is to bring bitcoin to people around the world, unlocking previously impossible use cases to accelerate a world built on better money. The team is composed of two engineering teams, Custody and Trading, who specialize in backend, security, and blockchain engineering. 

Bitcoin Platform Engineering is composed of two teams: Custody and Trading Engineering. We're responsible for managing and improving our hot and cold Bitcoin wallets, handling transfers in and out of our wallets, and working on next generation Bitcoin technology and features like running a Lightning network node. You will be responsible for designing, building, troubleshooting and improving Bitcoin platform features, services, and infrastructure. 

Just like Bitcoin, we are decentralized with team members across the U.S. and Australia working together to shape the future. We're scaling quickly and are excited to continue to grow the team this year! 

Qualifications

You have:

• 8+ years of relevant experience building backend systems at scale, specifically in the bitcoin or lightning space

• Experience leading the technical direction of large-scale projects, spanning multiple engineering teams

• A pragmatic approach with a focus on delivery.

• Ability to excel in macro and micro elements of software design.

• Demonstrated ability to influence those around through technical leadership, mentorship, and coaching

• Demonstrated technical initiative and leadership on previous projects.

• Motivation to contribute to a meaningful product that will fundamentally change the way people interact with financial institution. 

You will:

• Help enable instant cross-border payments by helping design, build, and deploy a self-custody Lightning solution for the wallet

• Work with other experts at Block to improve Bitcoin Development Kit and Lightning Development Kit to benefit the broader bitcoin ecosystem and community

• Influence and define the future blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies leveraged in the wallet, Block and the broader industry

• Help guide and write code that we can share between our mobile application and backend services

• Make key architecture and platform choices, leveraging existing Block infrastructure and best practices where appropriate and and forging a new path when our unique needs require it

• Collaborate with mobile and firmware engineers, product managers, and infrastructure and service teams throughout the company

• Own testing, observability, and maintenance for the solutions you and the team create

Technologies we use and teach:

• Java, Kotlin

• Go

• Docker, Kubernetes

• Jaeger, Prometheus, Datadog

• JUnit

• Hibernate, Vitess, Guice

• Bitcoin, Lightning

Additional Information

Block takes a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on your location. U.S. locations are categorized into one of four zones based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be determined based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. These ranges may