Lead Backend Engineer

About onRails

onRails is asset infrastructure that brings assets to Canton. Our mission is to open the world's financial system by enabling assets to move across networks with privacy, compliance, and atomic settlement. The onRails platform includes cETH — a 1:1 representation of ETH on the Canton Network.

The role

We are looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to build institutional execution and settlement infrastructure on the Canton Network from the ground up: liquidity aggregation, order routing, and atomic on-chain settlement. It is non-custodial by design — we never hold client assets.

You will be the first engineer dedicated to this product and will own its delivery: decomposition, code reviews, and technical decisions within the project. The architecture is defined together with the CTO, who is starting the foundational work now — you will pick it up, challenge it, and turn it into a working system. As the product grows, you will help hire and lead the engineers who join you.

This is a hands-on role. The backend is written in Go; the on-ledger part runs on Canton, where trades settle atomically. You are not expected to know Canton or Daml on day one — you are expected to learn them quickly.

What you will do

• Own the execution and settlement backend end-to-end, from design through production operation
• Turn the architecture into a working system: services, APIs, asynchronous workflows, data models
• Design for correctness, fault tolerance, idempotency, and observability
• Integrate with the Canton Network: transaction submission, settlement flows, ledger event processing
• Set the engineering practices for the project: service boundaries, reviews, testing, long-term maintainability
• Work directly with the CTO on technical decisions and with the founders on priorities and trade-offs
• Onboard and lead the engineers who join the team

What we are looking for

• Strong backend engineering experience in production systems
• Strong experience with distributed systems
• Strong proficiency in Go
• Experience designing, building, and owning backend services end-to-end
• Strong understanding of APIs, databases, asynchronous processing, and service-to-service communication
• Ability to reason clearly about consistency, reliability, failure modes, and system boundaries
• Experience leading a project or a small team — or a clear readiness to do so

Just as important as the technical side is how you work:

• You work autonomously in a remote team: you plan your own work, surface problems early, and don't need a manager over your shoulder
• You explain decisions and trade-offs clearly in writing and keep the team informed of progress and risks
• You take reviews and disagreement well — they are part of the job, not a threat
• You are comfortable working directly with founders and being accountable for outcomes, not just tasks
• High ownership and comfort operating in an early-stage environment

Nice to have

• Experience in crypto, blockchain infrastructure, exchanges, trading systems, wallets, custody, or settlement-heavy products
• Experience with order routing, RFQ, liquidity aggregation, or institutional connectivity
• Experience building financial or transaction-heavy systems
• Experience with functional programming languages (Haskell, OCaml, Scala, F#, etc.)
• Experience with Python for internal tooling, automation, or supporting backend services
• Pragmatic use of modern AI tools to improve engineering productivity and development workflows

What success looks like

Within the first months, a first version executes and settles trades end-to-end on a Canton test network, on a codebase the team is confident to extend. After that, the product is in production and you own its operation. The engineers who join the project are productive because you onboarded and lead them — and the CTO is no longer in the critical path of day-to-day delivery.