Senior Backend Engineer

Do you want to be part of the future of value transfer? Are you excited about solving problems that have never been solved before? Are you looking for a values led company, which cares about the growth of its employees? Elliptic's Real-time Risk team builds the engine that powers how our customers screen, monitor, and act on blockchain risk. We own the data pipelines, scoring infrastructure, and continuous monitoring systems that keep compliance teams ahead of financial crime, in real time, at enterprise scale.

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help us tackle the most technically demanding problems on the platform, working closely with data engineering counterparts to deliver capabilities that give customers a truly personalised, insight-rich view of the blockchain.

The impact you will have:

• As a Senior Software Engineer on the Real-time Risk team, you will help shape the technical direction of a complex, high-stakes system.
• You'll work on world-class sanctions reporting, contribute to scaling the platform to serve Elliptic's rapidly growing customer base, and partner closely with data engineering counterparts to bring unique, customer-specific insights to life.

This is a role for an engineer who wants to go deep, who can hold the complexity of distributed systems in their head, and who takes pride in building things that are both correct and fast.

What you will do:

• Design and build robust, high-throughput backend services supporting real-time risk scoring, screening, and continuous monitoring workflows.
• Work closely with data engineering teammates to deliver personalised intelligence to our customers, enabling unique, customer-specific views of the blockchain.
• Contribute to world-class sanctions reporting infrastructure that compliance teams and regulators depend on.
• Help scale the system to support Elliptic's growing enterprise customer base, identifying and resolving performance and reliability bottlenecks.
• Take ownership of technically complex areas, driving architecture and implementation decisions with sound trade-off reasoning.
• Review code, raise the technical quality of the team, and mentor engineers where appropriate.
• Collaborate with product, data, and engineering stakeholders to translate compliance requirements into well-designed, maintainable systems.

What you will achieve in the first 6 months:

• Deliver meaningful contributions to the Real-time Risk platform, building confidence across the codebase and event-driven architecture.
• Demonstrate clear technical ownership of an area of the system, including participation in design decisions and code review.
• Have a strong understanding of how sanctions screening and continuous monitoring work end-to-end, and be able to articulate where the biggest engineering challenges and opportunities are.

You will be a great fit here if you:

• Take joy from building solutions that solve real customer problems.
• Enjoy working in domains where correctness matters, and where the systems you build are depended on by real customers in regulated industries.
• Have a love of data intensive applications and products.
• Take a pragmatic approach to complexity, knowing when to simplify and when to invest in the right abstraction.

Our ideal candidate has:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production backend systems.
• Strong TypeScript/Node.js experience, with the ability to write clean, well-tested, production-ready code.
• Proven experience working with complex event-driven, streaming, or queue-backed architectures (e.g. Kinesis, Kafka, SQS, or similar) in a production environment.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems trade-offs: consistency, availability, latency, and failure modes.
• Experience working with NoSQL and caching technologies, with comfort reasoning about data access patterns and performance.
• A track record of contributing to technically complex codebases, and the ability to communicate architectural thinking clearly.
• AI fluency: you actively use AI tools to accelerate your work, and can demonstrate how you apply them effectively in engineering contexts.

Bonus Points for:

• Experience with Java, Scala, or another multi-threaded, JVM-based language.
• Familiarity with Redis or similar in-memory data stores, particularly for caching and low-latency reads.
• Experience with EVM-compatible blockchains or crypto compliance domains.
• OpenSearch/Elasticsearch experience, particularly around index design and schema migrations.

Job Benefits

• Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year.
• £500 Remote working budget to set up your home office space.
• $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development.
• Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays.
• An extra day for your birthday.
• Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave.
• Private Health Insurance - we use Vitality!
• Full access to Spill Mental Health Support.
• Life Assurance: 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries.
• Cycle to Work Scheme.