Senior Backend Engineer

Location: United Kingdom, Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

Department: Engineering

Workplace: remote

Description

About WalletConnect

WalletConnect is one of the core infrastructure teams in Web3. We build the connectivity layer that lets wallets and apps communicate securely across blockchains. Since launching in 2018, we’ve grown into a network of 75,000+ apps, 700+ wallets, and 50+ million users. Our mission is to power the financial internet by making digital ownership and payments interoperable and accessible.

We’ve recently launched WalletConnect Pay, a payments solution that lets merchants and payment providers leverage blockchain rails for new payment experiences, like stablecoin checkout, payouts, and deposits.

Backed by $38M from investors like Union Square Ventures, Shopify, Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Uniswap Labs, we’re a global, remote-first team that values openness, simplicity, innovation, and ownership.

Why Now

We’re entering our most ambitious chapter yet. WalletConnect Pay is an end-to-end crypto and stablecoin payment method built on the world’s largest wallet network — already embedded in Stripe, Coinbase Commerce, Shopify, MoonPay, Shift4, and BitPay, with a landmark partnership with Ingenico bringing stablecoin payments to 40M+ terminals across 120+ countries.

WalletConnect Pay is scaling fast and the engineering surface is growing with it. We’re building payment orchestration, merchant tooling, settlement infrastructure, internal business systems, and the SDKs that connect it all. We need senior backend engineers who can take ownership of complex problem spaces, ship production-grade services, and help us build the engineering foundation for the next generation of onchain payments.

The Role

This is a Senior Backend Engineer position on the WalletConnect Pay team. You’ll work across the Pay engineering surface which spans payment orchestration, merchant APIs, settlement flows, internal business services, and the infrastructure that supports them.

What you work on will depend on where the team needs you most and where your strengths are best applied. Some engineers go deep on payment orchestration and partner integrations. Others focus on merchant-facing APIs and developer experience. Others build the internal services that power finance, ops, and compliance workflows. The common thread is senior-level backend ownership: you’ll design APIs, build services, own your deployments, and ensure the systems you ship are correct, observable, and production-grade.

Day-to-day, you’ll write technical design documents, ship production code, collaborate on architecture decisions with your engineering lead, and operate with the autonomy and accountability expected of a senior IC in a fast-moving payments team. You’ll work primarily in Rust and TypeScript, with infrastructure managed through AWS and Terraform.

We expect engineers to use AI tools effectively in day-to-day work — AI-assisted coding combined with strong human review is a core part of how we operate.

Key Responsibilities

Backend Service Design & Delivery

• Design, build, and maintain backend services across the WalletConnect Pay platform — payment flows, APIs, data pipelines, and internal tooling.
• Make sound architectural decisions for the services you own: API design, data modelling, error handling, and system boundaries.
• Write technical design documents before major implementation work and participate in architectural reviews.
• Ship production-quality code with strong testing, clear documentation, and attention to edge cases.

Ownership & Operations

• Own your services end-to-end: implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
• Contribute infrastructure using AWS and Terraform. We don’t have a dedicated infra function, so engineers own their infra.
• Build observability into everything you ship  logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting that meet the reliability bar of a production payment system.
• Respond to and learn from production incidents, driving improvements to system resilience.

Collaboration & Engineering Culture

• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders including Product, Design, Ops, Finance, Legal, and BD  to turn requirements into clean implementations.
• Participate in code review culture with AI-assisted development workflows, including automated agent reviews on PRs.
• Contribute to engineering standards, documentation, and team processes that help the Pay team scale.

Requirements

• Senior-level backend engineering experience - you’ve designed, shipped, and operated production services with real users and real consequences.
• Strong API and system design skills - you can make sound architectural decisions in ambiguous problem spaces and reason clearly about trade-offs.
• Production experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), comfortable working with managed services in a cloud-native environment.
• Comfortable owning infrastructure via Terraform or equivalent, you deploy and manage what you build.
• Ability to translate business requirements from non-engineering stakeholders into correct, maintainable implementations.
• Strong written and verbal communication, you write clear technical documents, reason about trade-offs with non-engineers, and work effectively in an async, remote team.
• Uses AI tools effectively in day-to-day engineering. We expect AI-assisted coding combined with strong human review as a core part of how we work.

Nice-to-Haves

• Rust experience or strong systems-language background with willingness to ramp quickly (AI-assisted).
• Experience with payment systems or financial infrastructure, transaction lifecycles, settlement, reconciliation, fees, FX.
• Experience building merchant-facing or developer-facing APIs and tooling.
• Exposure to data transformation, reporting pipelines, or internal business systems.
• Crypto/Web3 familiarity. Understanding of wallets, tokens, chains, stablecoins, or on-chain settlement patterns.

Benefits

• Fully remote position with a budget for your home office or work environment.
• Regular team offsites to incredible locations around the world.
• Opportunities to travel to conferences and community events.
• Generous PTO and parental leave.
• Meaningful Learning & Development budget.
• Competitive compensation package including salary, equity, and potentially tokens.
• Healthcare coverage for US-based team members.
• The chance to build at the forefront of onchain payments with one of the most recognised companies in Web3.