Ellipsis Labs is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer in Engineering — New York, New York. The overview below is synthesized from the employer posting on jobs.ashbyhq.com: factual requirements and scope are preserved, but prose is rewritten with editorial context. Verify details and apply via the employer link.
Ellipsis Labs is a profitable, venture-backed New York-based startup building sustainable and efficient DeFi protocols on high-throughput decentralized infrastructure. Our long-term goal is to build a better financial system.
Our flagship product, Phoenix Perpetuals, brings professional-grade perpetual futures to Solana. Building on our experience developing efficient markets, Ellipsis Labs also operates SolFi, a proprietary automated market maker that provides efficient liquidity for key trading pairs.
Ellipsis Labs is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our team. As an early-stage startup, we appreciate bright generalists who can iterate and ship quickly.
- Build and maintain scalable production services. We currently support thousands of QPS, and future systems will need to handle at least another order of magnitude.
- Implement systems to monitor performance at the micro- and nano-second level
- Drive ambitious engineering initiatives (for example, realtime data indexing at scale) from inception to completion: specification, architecture, implementation, testing, monitoring, and maintenance
Qualifications
Experience and skills the team lists as required:
Required
- 3+ years of experience building and maintaining production-grade software systems (preferably in Rust, C++, C, or Golang), with high-quality and well-documented production code
- 3+ years of experience with Unix systems
- Experience working with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS
- Ability to make informed engineering decisions based on relevant business context
- A demonstrated track record of high agency, willingness to dive into unfamiliar technical and non-technical areas, and a team-first attitude
- Passion for decentralized finance
Preferred
Additional experience noted as a plus:
- Experience working with blockchain technology, specifically Solana
- Experience in quant trading or fintech
- Proficiency in Rust
Build a standout application
For the Senior Backend Engineer at Ellipsis Labs, reviewers look for concise evidence over buzzwords. Mirror the language of the posting sparingly, quantify support or delivery outcomes, and show how you handled ambiguity, time-zone collaboration and user empathy. Keep your resume to impact, keep your cover note to one page, and link to artifacts — tickets resolved, docs shipped, dashboards owned — that prove you can operate in a fast-moving Web3 team. Prepare to discuss a time you turned a confusing user report into a clear fix and how you measure quality in support and operations.
Web3 hiring values reliability: on-time follow-through, clear writing, and a track record of improving runbooks and tooling. Treat the application as a work sample. For interviews, be ready to walk through how you prioritize across time zones, handle a difficult user, and decide when to escalate versus resolve directly. Show how you document decisions so the next teammate benefits.
In a distributed Web3 org, trust builds through written clarity. Use the cover note to demonstrate it.