Senior Backend Controls Engineer

About Uphold

Uphold is a financial technology company that believes on-chain services are the future of finance. It provides modern infrastructure for on-chain payments, banking and investments. Offering Consumer Services, Business Services and Institutional Trading, Uphold makes pioneering financial services easy and trusted for millions of customers in more than 140 countries.

Uphold integrates with more than 30 trading venues, including centralized and decentralized exchanges, to deliver superior liquidity and optimal execution. Uphold never loans out customer assets and is always 100% reserved.
The company pioneered radical transparency and uniquely publishes its assets and liabilities every 30 seconds on a public website (https://uphold.com/en-us/transparency).

Uphold strips away the complexity and lack of transparency to open up Web3 finance for everyone.

To learn more about Uphold, please visit https://uphold.com.

Job Summary

Uphold is looking for a Controls Engineer to join our Engineering team. This is an incredibly exciting opportunity where you’ll take technical ownership of building and evolving our consumer and business APIs, as well as the microservices powering our web and mobile applications.

You will design, build, and evolve services with three core principles in mind: maintainability, performance, and security — while making informed trade-offs and influencing architectural direction across the platform.

If you are excited about high-availability requirements, complex scalability problems, automated workflows, infrastructure orchestration, queueing systems, and APIs and protocols like gRPC — and enjoy tackling ambiguous, high-impact problems — Uphold is the place for you.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Owning and driving the development of the most powerful, easy-to-use payment platform in the world.

Leading the delivery of complex features and platform enhancements from design through production.

Making and influencing architectural decisions across digital and crypto services and microservice boundaries.

Collaborating with product managers, designers, engineers, and other stakeholders throughout the full software development life cycle.

Acting as a technical reference point for the team, helping to raise the bar on code quality, system design, and engineering practices.

Proactively identifying risks related to performance, scalability, reliability, and security — and driving mitigation.

Staying current with the evolving tech stack and blockchain ecosystem, and helping guide adoption decisions.

Writing high-quality, production-ready code with a strong focus on scalability and long-term maintainability.

Building and evolving a microservice architecture with a strong emphasis on security, observability, and resilience.

Required Qualifications and Skills

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

6+ years of professional software engineering experience.

Strong backend engineering experience with
Node.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc.

Deep understanding of programming language ecosystems, including performance characteristics and operational trade-offs.

Strong understanding of relational databases (preferably PostgreSQL) and non-relational databases (e.g. Redis).

Strong understanding of web semantics, APIs, and distributed systems concepts.

Experience working with version control systems and modern development workflows.

Working knowledge of standard development pipelines, including build, test, and deployment automation.

Working knowledge and experience with AI tools, such as
claude.ai, etc.

Fluent written and oral English skills, with the ability to communicate technical decisions clearly.

Bonus if you have:

Experience designing and operating APIs consumed by external teams or partners.

Solid knowledge of Compliance and Fraud tooling.

Experience building event-driven systems using message queues (e.g. Kafka, NSQ, Pulsar, RabbitMQ).

Experience with Temporal for building durable, fault-tolerant distributed workflows.

Experience integrating and operating third-party APIs in security-sensitive environments.

A proven record of working with performance budgets, SLAs, or SLOs.

Strong domain fluency in cryptocurrencies or other digital assets.

Public speaking experience, technical writing, certifications, or blog posts.

Open-source contributions, including tooling, libraries, or meaningful fixes to existing projects.

What We Offer

Innovation and Impact: Contribute to pioneering projects in a dynamic and challenging environment.

Competitive Compensation: Performance bonuses, and comprehensive benefits on top of a competitive salary.

Strong Company Culture: Thrive in a supportive, collegiate environment with values of integrity, teamwork, accountability, and excellence.

Global Collaboration: Participate in regular updates, strategy sessions, and networking opportunities across the group.

Development Opportunities: Access training and mentorship programs.

Flexibility: Enjoy options to work from home, other locations, or adjust your hours.

Inclusive Environment: Value and respect diverse perspectives.

Our Benefits

Annual bonus program based on individual, team and company performance.

Home office stipend for a productive setup.

Generous PTO, healthcare, and employee assistance programs.

Engaging events and celebrations.

Well-stocked office kitchen with a foodie culture.

Join us to grow, innovate, and contribute meaningfully. Be part of our talented team!

Visit our careers page for more exciting opportunities, if this role isn’t the perfect fit.

EEOC Employer

We're proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and we celebrate our employees' differences, including race, color, religion, gender identity, national origin, age, military service eligibility, veteran status, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, and any other protected classes. Difference makes us stronger and better - together.