Senior Software Engineer, Technical Leadership / Platform

**Cyclops** Senior Software Engineer, Technical Leadership / Platform; $50K–$90K (Latam) / $140K–$150K (US); USA, Argentina or Brazil (Remote)

**About Company** Cyclops (cyclops.io) is the all-in-one crypto and stablecoin platform built exclusively for payments companies. Clients onboard with a single partner and unlock stablecoin settlement, payins, payouts, and treasury optimization across global corridors — all through a single API. The platform is built on top of leading providers at every layer of the stablecoin stack (custody, KYX, screening) with proprietary orchestration technology on top, and is the only platform offering product and license redundancy in all major markets, with dozens of partners and over 100 global licenses.

Founded by payments executives and crypto veterans, Cyclops announced a $20M Series A in July 2026 (Fortune exclusive). The company is remote-first with offices in Miami and Vienna, and runs a first-principles, founder-mindset culture — compliance-first, AI-driven, client-obsessed.

**About the Role** A hands-on senior engineer with a Technical Leadership / Platform specialization who owns the technical foundation of the platform — roughly 30–50% architecture, the rest hands-on on the most complex, highest-risk backend work. This person defines the platform architecture, so crypto-specific failure modes (finality and reorgs, vendor sandbox-vs-production gaps, stablecoin settlement mechanics, compliance flows in the money path) must be known upfront, not learned on the job. IC-track — no people management, technical influence only. Reports to the Engineering Manager.

**Responsibilities** - Design and evolve core platform services — reliability, data integrity, clear service boundaries; identify architectural risks and scalability limits before they hit production. - Implement the most complex, high-risk backend components in TypeScript/Node.js, owning correctness under partial-failure scenarios. - Design reliability mechanisms: retries and backoff, timeouts, idempotency, partial-failure handling, degraded and fallback modes. - Act as the primary technical contact for partners and clients on API/SDK integrations: solution reviews, troubleshooting, roadmap alignment, documentation. - Drive observability improvements (metrics, logs, tracing) and participate in production incident analysis. - Raise the team's technical maturity through code reviews, decomposition of ambiguous problems, pairing, and documentation.

**Required Skills** A. 6+ years of professional backend engineering, with strong TypeScript and Node.js. B. Deep hands-on crypto infrastructure experience — designed and ran production systems that move real funds (custody, wallets, exchange, payments, or settlement). Hard filter. C. Built the orchestration layer of a crypto payments platform on top of third-party vendors (custody, KYX, screening APIs): transaction-flow orchestration, settlement, ledger and reconciliation, compliance requirements in the money path. D. Deep distributed-systems design experience: microservices, service boundaries and data models, API contracts, queues and async communication. E. End-to-end production ownership: on-call, incident response, debugging API failures and data issues. F. Excellent PostgreSQL/SQL. G. Proficient daily use of AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Copilot) with fast, critical review of AI output. H. Strong written and verbal English — able to defend technical decisions with partners' engineers.

**Bonus Skills** - Regulated financial environments (licensing, audits, compliance-driven engineering). - Event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS); Redis; Docker, Kubernetes, AWS. - Architecture leadership across timezones in a distributed team.

**Logistical Info** - Location: Remote from USA, Argentina, or Brazil only (countries with EU data-adequacy status — the role accesses EU customer data). US Eastern working hours with a minimum 4h daily overlap with Central European time. - Compensation: $50K–$90K (Latam) / $140K–$150K (US). Full-time dedicated contractor engagement, typically via Deel. - Number of openings: 1 - **Other:** Company-issued laptop and technology accessories. Annual in-person full-team meetup.

**Ideal Background** - "Core" / "platform" teams at crypto payments platforms and stablecoin infrastructure providers: Bridge, BVNK, Zero Hash, Triple A, Conduit, Paxos, Circle (payments/platform teams, not the issuance core). - Crypto payments teams inside larger players: Stripe crypto, PayPal (PYUSD). - Team matters more than brand — most engineers at these companies work on adjacent products (dashboards, growth, mobile). Screen for what the person owned: transaction-flow orchestration, settlement, ledger/reconciliation, compliance implementation. - Orchestration-layer builders, not primitives builders: deep custody infrastructure engineers (MPC, policy engines, key management) solve a different class of problems and are not the fit. - Near-miss handling: exceptional ledger/reconciliation engineers from non-crypto payments (Modern Treasury, Adyen, banking core) — do NOT drop; submit flagged with detail. If they miss this role, senior engineering roles are opening where on-the-job crypto learning is the explicit model. - Calibration: client has no reference profiles; they offered to review 3–5 proposed profiles with yes/no + a one-line reason within a day. Use this early. - Comp note: bands are the client's estimate — they asked for our input if off-market. Flag if we see them off. - Priority: the highest-priority hire of Cyclops' current round. **Green Flags** - Owned production money-movement systems: real incident and reconciliation war stories. - Knows crypto failure modes upfront: finality/reorgs, vendor sandbox-vs-production gaps, stablecoin settlement mechanics, compliance in the money path. - Resilience-and-reconciliation mindset over pure latency focus. - High agency: treats problems in scope as theirs, escalates with a proposed plan. - Client-facing technical credibility: explains constraints to a partner's engineers and writes clearly — past that bar, the client compares on engineering depth only.

**Red Flags** - "Crypto experience" that is exchange API integrations, trading bots, or personal web3 projects — does not meet the bar. - Protocol / smart-contract engineers (Solidity, L1/L2 core, DeFi protocols) — Cyclops builds systems that use blockchains via vendors, not blockchains. - Solutions/integration engineers who wired APIs for clients rather than owning a platform. - Architect-titled candidates without production ownership (never on-call, no incident stories). - People-manager-track candidates looking to "get back to hands-on" — IC-track role; screen for current hands-on depth. - Yellow flag (not auto-reject): exchange matching-engine / trading-infra specialists — strong distributed systems, but latency-focused rather than resilience/reconciliation.

**Interview Process** 1. Technical deep-dive with the hiring manager and a tech lead (~90 min): their systems, money-movement war stories, architecture judgment, plus a live working session on a realistic domain task in a close-to-real environment, including an AI-assisted section. No take-homes, no leetcode. 2. Culture fit + expectations conversation (~60 min) with the Director of Engineering and the Engineering Manager. 3. 15-minute call with a co-founder: motivation, mutual questions, what Cyclops is building and why. 4. Offer call (20–30 min) with the hiring manager to walk through details.