Senior Backend Engineer

About Palette Labs

Palette Labs is building a decentralized protocol for commerce. Our first major use case is food delivery. We run a profitable, growing network where customers order from restaurants, drivers deliver food, and local operators spin up their own marketplaces. Think Uber Eats, but permissionless and owned by the people who use it.

We’re now focused on furthering the development of our protocol, and making it easier for businesses to participate in it. That means designing verifiable data models, interoperable onchain/offchain infrastructure, economic incentives, and the core primitives that allow anyone to build on top of Palette’s decentralized commerce network.

To learn more about Palette Labs and read our whitepaper take a look at: https://palette-labs-inc.github.io/

About the role

This Senior Backend Engineer role is essential to building and scaling the core Palette Labs platform from early foundations to a robust, production-grade system.

You will own the design, development, and reliability of backend services that serve as nodes in our protocol or participants in it. You’ll be primarily focused on building well-architected web services, REST APIs, and foundational data systems that power our applications and partner integrations. We’re looking for someone who has built systems from scratch in startup environments and understands how to make pragmatic architectural decisions under ambiguity.

We don’t have a strong language preference, but our current stack is primarily Rust. You should be comfortable working across languages and excited to write production Rust if you haven’t already.

You will partner closely with the founders and product team to define long-term backend architecture, establish engineering best practices, and lay the groundwork for scale. Success will be measured by the quality, reliability, and extensibility of the services you build, and your ability to drive major technical milestones in the first 6–12 months.

Responsibilities

• Design and build production-grade web services and REST APIs from first principles.

• Architect clean, maintainable service boundaries, data models, and internal interfaces.

• Own backend systems end-to-end — from schema design to deployment and production reliability.

• Implement best practices around transactional consistency, concurrency, and fault tolerance.

• Establish observability standards (metrics, tracing, logging), SLOs, and operational playbooks.

• Lead technical execution across major initiatives, ensuring systems are extensible and scalable.

• Partner with product to translate ambiguous requirements into clean backend abstractions.

• Raise the bar on engineering rigor, testing strategy, and long-term maintainability.

Requirements

Must-haves

• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, with a strong track record of shipping production systems.

• Significant experience building and operating web services and RESTful APIs.

• Experience in startup or early-stage environments where you’ve built systems 0→1.

• Deep understanding of backend architecture fundamentals: service design, data modeling, API design, and distributed systems basics.

• Strong experience with databases (schema design, indexing, query optimization, safe migrations).

• Experience owning systems in production (observability, incident response, performance tuning).

• Proficiency in at least one modern backend language (e.g., Rust, Go, TypeScript/Node, Java, C#, Python) and comfort learning new ones.

Nice-to-haves

• Production experience with Rust.

• Experience designing service-oriented or microservice architectures.

• Familiarity with event-driven systems (queues, pub/sub, async processing).

• Experience working in high-transaction or financially sensitive systems.

• Experience with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containers, and Infrastructure as Code.

• Strong product intuition and ability to operate autonomously in ambiguous environments.

Compensation & Details

Total Rewards Package

We believe in a comprehensive and competitive compensation strategy that rewards talent and drive. Our flexible Total Rewards Package typically includes:

Component Description Base Salary A competitive annual salary, commensurate with your experience and industry standards. Performance Bonus Eligible for our company semi-annual performance bonus, which is tied directly to individual achievements. Equity / Stock Options We offer stock options to all full‑time employees, allowing you to share directly in the company's success and long-term growth.

Comprehensive Benefits

We are committed to the health, well‑being, and long‑term financial security of our team. Benefits coverage typically begins on the first day of employment.

• Health & Wellness: 100% employer‑covered premium options for Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance for employees.

• Time Off: Flexible Paid Time Off (PTO) policy

Unless otherwise stated, all roles with Palette Labs are remote-based in the United States with a preference to hire in New York City. We require that you overlap some working hours with Eastern Standard Time (EST).