Do you have hands on experience prototyping, engineering and scaling complex distributed systems platforms and SDKs at the intersection of cryptography, web3 and finance? Are you someone who thrives across the stack from hardware to infrastructure to software, and can comfortably write software that makes wise trade offs between the CAP theorem as it scales horizontally from the client to API layer to the data layer? Can you move fast, and design a system which solves immediate business needs and increases capability over time in a production environment? Are you excited by the novel challenges of designing large scale, complex distributed systems with decentralization, safety, and anonymity as a core requirement?

Do you enjoy collaborating with engineers, TPMs and Product Managers and leading the design and architecture for mission critical, cross functional initiatives? 

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is looking for a talented, experienced Principal Engineer/Architect to join our team. In this role, you’ll be designing, building, and implementing the tools and services that empower Stellar's ecosystem. By working with our engineering teams, you'll be working on open source projects that empower developers to use the Stellar network for a wide variety of goals and use cases.

In this role, you will:

• Be involved with all aspects of the development process for platform projects - from vision to final implementation.
• Design new platform functionality with the corresponding APIs for external developers.
• Build and maintain web services to support the foundation’s mission of creating equitable access to the global financial system.
• Identify patterns in developer needs and design new protocols and services to increase developer velocity across our entire ecosystem.
• Engage with our community of open source developers on projects that encompass many different frameworks, languages, and ideas.
• Collaborate with the team on code review and design, and contribute to best practices for all of engineering at SDF.
• Investigate and refactor performance bottlenecks in order to continue scaling our API services.
• Provide assistance and guidance for our integration projects with our partners and other organizations on the Stellar network.
• Author detailed technical feature and protocol (RFC) specifications - we take design seriously, and we encourage everyone to be a part of our RFC processes.

You have: 

• 7 years of experience developing software on a team.
• Strong computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and information retrieval.
• Written server applications in languages such as Go, Rust, Python, JavaScript, Java or C and are language polyglot.
• Experience in supporting production web services at scale.
• Great communication that can advocate and lead technical discussions, especially during the design and code review process.
• Solid understanding of software design patterns, and how to build components that are reusable, extensible, and modular.
• Knowledgeable of existing frameworks and open source tools and are willing to build new frameworks when open ones do not exist.
• A passion for performance debugging and benchmarking.
• Enthusiasm about working on a small, growing team where you'll be given a lot of autonomy.
• Open, empathetic, and care about putting the best ideas forward in a collaborative and helpful manner.

Bonus points if: 

• You have a BS or MS in Computer Science or other STEM fields.
• You generally enjoy working on a wide variety of smaller projects as opposed to regularly creating features in a single large system.
• You have a strong curiosity in blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies, and understand the fundamentals of these systems.

We offer competitive pay with a base salary range for this position of $200,000 - $260,000 depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. In addition, we offer lumen-denominated grants along with the following perks and benefits: