The vacancy is well-structured with clear expectations and compensation, though company visibility could improve.
Job description
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a mission-driven team working on cutting-edge blockchain technology to create equitable access to the global financial system. Since 2014, SDF has fueled the growth of the Stellar blockchain network. The team is expanding to support the rapidly growing ecosystem. This role is within a small team (approx. 8 engineers) incubating a novel distributed systems prototype—not a traditional blockchain, but something new. This is a zero-to-one build, requiring the creation of new infrastructure and tooling, not a maintenance role or an academic project. The team operates as a fast-moving, highly technical group, working directly with the protocol architect and core systems engineers to take this greenfield project to production. The ideal candidate thrives on urgency and seeks the agility of an early-stage startup with the stability of SDF.
Responsibilities
- Designing and building JSON-RPC endpoints for external tools, SDKs, and wallets.
- Owning the full transaction path from client to consensus and back, including status tracking, error reporting, and timeout handling.
- Building the data backend for the block explorer, partner integrations, and historical state queries.
- Building analytics pipelines (e.g., BigQuery) and implementing robust metrics and event logging using tools like Prometheus, Clickhouse, and Sentry.
- Working across service boundaries to understand component behavior.
Requirements
- Strong systems or backend programming experience in Rust, C++ or both.
- Proven track record of designing and building robust RPC/API services that handle real-world, high-scale traffic.
- Deep understanding of database architecture, indexing, and query patterns.
- Ownership of production infrastructure, not just prototypes.
- Prior experience building or operating blockchain infrastructure (nodes, RPC layers, indexers) in production.
- Experience with a testnet or mainnet launch.
About Stellar Development Foundation
The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is a nonprofit organization that supports the development and growth of the Stellar network, a public blockchain for borderless payments, asset tokenization, and DeFi solutions. It provides grants, funding, resources, and tooling to builders and organizations while maintaining the network's codebase to create equitable access to the global financial system.