Backend Engineer

About Kamino

Kamino's mission is to create liquidity and utility for every asset. We want the world's best investments to be available through the financial platforms people already trust, and we want investors to be able to borrow against what they own when they need liquidity, instead of having to sell.

Today, the most valuable assets in the world are often the least useful to own. Trillions of dollars sit in private markets, behind high minimums and holding periods that can run for years. Tokenization is starting to move these assets onto shared, programmable infrastructure, but putting an asset onchain is only the first step. To be useful, it still needs distribution, compliance, servicing, credit and liquidity.

Kamino already runs the credit and liquidity engine at scale. It is the largest credit protocol on Solana and the largest credit platform for real-world assets onchain, with more than $650 billion in cumulative transaction volume and more than $20 billion in loans originated.

Now we are building the rest of that system for institutions. Kamino recently named Yieldstreet co-founder Michael Weisz as CEO and is building a new HQ in New York, alongside the asset managers and financial platforms that will shape this market. Almost none of that market exists yet, and we intend to build it.

The Role

You'll build the production APIs and backend services that sit between Kamino's on-chain programs and the people who use them — the layer that turns raw chain state into a fast, correct, developer-grade experience. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role: you'll design systems that have to be high-throughput and exactly right, because they move real money.

The Ideal Kamino Engineer

We hire engineers who love their craft, work fluently with AI, and understand software deeply. Across every engineering role, we look for:

• Seniority: real judgment and high mileage — engineers who have seen many systems break, and know why.

• Strong fundamentals: types, memory, concurrency, distributed systems — and opinions about all of them.

• Builders: people who love to build and tinker, and who ship.

• Quality-oriented: unwilling to ship careless, fragile, or poorly understood code; pragmatic about balancing speed, maintainability, and security in production.

• AI-native: uses modern AI-assisted tooling effectively — to move faster, understand more code, and raise the quality of testing and review.

What you'll own

• Design and ship scalable, correct backend services powering Kamino's core surfaces: lending, borrowing, and yield.

• Own the API contract our apps and external integrators build on — modeling, validation, versioning, and backward compatibility.

• Build the data and indexing layers that expose on-chain state — balances, positions, transactions — in real time.

• Set the standard for reliability and observability across the services you own.

Must haves

• Background in software engineering, ideally with 3+ years of professional experience.

• Experience building production-grade APIs and backend services.

• Experience with scalable API design, including request/response modeling, validation, pagination, rate limiting, error handling, and backward compatibility.

• Familiarity with web/backend frameworks. Our stack is primarily TypeScript and Rust, but experience with Python, Go, Java, C#, or similar ecosystems is also relevant.

• Understanding of the tradeoffs between asynchronous/event-loop based programming and multi-threaded programming.

• Solid understanding of SQL and relational databases, including indexing, query planning, transactions, and performance tradeoffs.

• Understanding of caching layers, message queues, Pub/Sub systems, and eventual consistency.

• Understanding of stateless vs stateful services, including deployment and scaling implications.

Good to have

• Experience working with row-oriented and columnar storage systems, and understanding when each model is appropriate.

• Experience with key-value stores, document databases, or cache systems such as Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB, etc., including their benefits and tradeoffs.

• Experience with observability, metrics, tracing, logging, alerting, and debugging production systems.

• Experience designing systems that handle high throughput, low latency, or large data volumes.

• Interested in blockchain: no need to have spent a whole career in crypto, but a genuine interest in the domain.

Competitive advantage

• Experience building APIs for blockchain systems, especially Solana.

• Experience with blockchain indexing, transaction simulation, wallet/account data, token balances, DeFi protocols, or real-time on-chain data streams.

Kamino is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to building an inclusive workplace. Kamino does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.