Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based AI lab developing the Kimi series of open-weight large language models.
Moonshot is the “Robinhood for DeFi”—an iOS and Android app that lets anyone trade cryptocurrencies on-chain through a user-friendly interface. Since our launch in July 2024, we’ve attracted 2M+ users. Our mission: Make moonshots possible for everyone. Our vision: Make a world where life-changing financial outcomes are within everyone's reach. Everyone on our team is both a decision-maker and an implementer—united by a sense of urgency and driven by the conviction that our work can transform global finance. If you thrive on curiosity, welcome tough challenges, and aspire to leave a meaningful mark on the world, Moonshot is the place for you. You’ll run toward the hardest problems alongside high-caliber teammates who consistently push each other to excel and who share your dedication to shaping the future of decentralized finance. This role is full-time, preferably located in NYC. Open to remote for the right candidate. THE OPPORTUNITY As a Backend Engineer at Moonshot, you’ll own some of the most critical systems in our stack: identity and access, funds movement and ledgering, and the blockchain infrastructure that powers our on-chain trading. This role is similar to staff engineers at leading crypto wallets and exchanges who own authentication stacks, key management, and high-scale financial backends. You’ll design, build, and operate systems that must be both highly reliable and extremely secure, enabling product teams to move quickly on a solid foundation. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Design, build, and operate Identity & Access Management services: - Authentication flows, sessions, device trust. - Authorization and entitlements (roles, permissions, policies). - Security controls such as MFA and key management (working with security teams). - Own financial operations systems: - Transfers and payments orchestration. - Ledgering and reconciliation flows. - Limits, risk controls, and transactional correctness. - Build and maintain blockchain infrastructure: - Node and RPC management. - Transaction submission, monitoring, and retry logic. - Indexing and streaming of on-chain data into internal services and data stores. - Define and uphold reliability and observability standards: - SLOs and error budgets for core services. - Dashboards, alerts, runbooks, and incident management practices. - Lead large, cross-functional technical projects from design through rollout, collaborating with Product, Security, and Ops. - Mentor and guide other engineers, contributing to engineering standards, design reviews, and documentation. - Stay close to industry best practices in auth, key management, and secure infrastructure for crypto and trading. WHAT WE LOOK FOR IN YOU - 5–12+ years of backend or product or platform engineering, including experience with high-scale, high-availability systems in fintech, crypto, or similar domains. - Deep expertise in at least one of: - Identity & access / security engineering - Financial systems / ledgering / payments - Blockchain infrastructure / on-chain data - Strong experience designing and operating distributed systems (datastores, queues, streaming, background workers). - Track record driving architecture decisions and seeing them through implementation and adoption. - Strong operational mindset: monitoring, on-call, incident response, and postmortems. - Excellent collaboration skills, especially with Product, Security, and Ops. NICE TO HAVES - Experience with Flutter, React Native, React, Headless CRMs - Experience with Go, Rust, Solana - Experience with Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services - Experience with crypto wallets, exchanges, or onchain protocols including DeFi, L2s, ZK - Exposure to data warehousing and analytics for financial reporting. - Contributions to open-source projects. LOCATION - NYC preferred (with periodic in-person sprints). - Remote-friendly within the United States and Canada; travel ~1wk/quarter COMPENSATION & PACKAGE - Competitive salary and meaningful equity. - 5% 401(k) match. - Health benefits with employer-covered premiums, plus life insurance coverage. - One-time office setup stipend. - Flexible PTO.