Senior Engineer, Cycles
Toronto or Remote (Canada, US or Europe)
About the Cycles team
The Cycles team (previously known as CoFi, see thread) at Informal Systems is part of an early stage startup effort within the company to build an open clearing protocol, a platform to clear the most debt for the most people with the least money. In contrast to existing payment systems focused solely on the transfer of assets, Cycles is focused instead on the clearing of debts by operating over the network of liabilities which underly all payments. By taking this network view, Cycles unlocks profound new opportunities for regular businesses to access preferred sources of liquidity, and to reduce risk both individually and systemically.
Cycles enables businesses to easily and privately upload their obligations, connect their sources of liquidity, settle up, and save. Turns out there are significant inefficiencies in the payments graph that create cash flow stress and higher working capital costs for businesses. These inefficiencies derive from lack of a coherent view of the obligation network, and can be resolved through atomic multi-lateral fault-tolerant execution of solutions to a flow optimization problem defined over the network of payment obligations and available sources of liquidity. Using the network of obligations as a foundation, Cycles provides a platform for new kinds of currencies, lending protocols, and issuance protocols to be integrated in a risk-reduced environment for the benefit of real-world commerce.
About the Role
As a Senior Engineer, you will have the opportunity to have a substantial impact on the overall success of the product(s) developed by the team, as well as the culture of the team. You will operate across the full-stack, working on both the front-end and back-end, and integrating across both traditional fintech services and leading cryptocurrency protocols. Being able to take ownership of significant tasks and working well in a small, tight-knit team with rapidly evolving requirements are essential to success. The Cycles team at Informal Systems has deep expertise in blockchain protocols, graph theory, payment protocols, and software engineering.
What sets us apart
Informal Systems has a strong, collaborative, remote-first culture that prioritizes autonomy, mastery, ownership, and purpose. Beyond the Cycles team, we have deep theoretical and practical distributed systems and formal methods experience. Our other business units perform security audits, run network infrastructure, and lead development of interchain protocols.
What your primary responsibilities will be:
- Collaboratively designing, delivering, maintaining and operating complex software applications that address business needs in a dynamic environment (e.g. prior early stage software product development experience)
- Providing thoughtful, constructive guidance and feedback on software architecture/design and code (e.g. during synchronous discussions, in pull request reviews)
- Deploying and operating software in production
- Defining and adapting technical architecture to meet business needs
- Mentoring and/or coaching junior team members
- Making use of shared processes, practices and tooling for effective synchronous and asynchronous collaboration
What we're looking for
- 5+ years production software engineering experience
- Significant experience building fintech, payments, banking, and/or cryptocurrency protocols
- Significant experience with full-stack Javascript/Typescript development
- Ability to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced, result-driven environment
- Ability to solve complex problems with the simplest possible solutions (KISS principle)
- Relational database experience
- Experience with using Linux, especially server environments
- Ability to self-motivate, working independently and as part of a team in remote and/or hybrid environments
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- An understanding of how to maintain healthy relationships, including healthy conflict management
Bonus points for:
- Demonstrated experience with the following specific technologies and/or approaches:
- React.js and TypeScript
- Programming languages such as Rust, Go and/or Python
- RESTful APIs
- PostgreSQL and/or Supabase
- Integration with third party APIs
- Delivering working CI/CD pipelines
- GitHub and GitHub Actions
- Ansible and Terraform
- DigitalOcean
- Technical team leadership
- A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related field
Some of our benefits include:
- A unique, caring and friendly culture (learn more about how we work here)
- 25 days (5 weeks) of paid vacation annually, plus 3 Spiritual Days
- Company closure from December 25th to January 1
- Annual Lifestyle benefits (reimbursements for gym memberships, fitness equipment, etc)
- A remote-first, flexible work environment
- A home-office stipend to set you up for success
- Annual company retreats
- Paid parental leave
- ….. and many more!
remote work