The posting
At Utila, we build the enterprise-grade platform that more than 400 companies run their digital asset operations on. Our technology secures $30B+ in monthly transaction volume and has facilitated over $500B in transactions to date. We're backed by $50M+ in funding, and our customer base is growing fast.
The systems we build are mission-critical, so we hold them to the highest standards: precise, secure, and reliable.
At Utila, We Own It. We look beyond individual tasks and requirements to understand the bigger picture — our customers, our product, and the systems we build. We take ownership end to end, from identifying the real problem and challenging assumptions to designing, implementing, and operating the solution.
As a Principal Engineer in the CTO Office, you'll help shape the architecture, security, and technical foundations of our platform, working directly with the CTO and engineering leadership.
This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with company-wide technical influence. You'll tackle some of our hardest engineering challenges — from complex distributed systems and core product architecture to infrastructure security and critical trust boundaries.
You'll have the autonomy to identify high-impact problems, challenge existing approaches, research alternatives, and drive solutions across teams.
We expect you to go beyond recommendations and design documents: prototype solutions, write production code, and drive initiatives through implementation and operation.
This isn't a traditional security role focused on compliance, vulnerability scanning, or audits. Nor is it a purely architectural position detached from implementation.
We're looking for someone who thinks deeply, challenges assumptions, and turns complex technical problems into working systems.
Responsibilities
- Drive critical architecture decisions: Design and evolve technically complex systems across our platform, including backend services, APIs, distributed systems, and data infrastructure. Lead initiatives from initial research and design through implementation and operation.
- Solve core product challenges: Tackle difficult engineering problems involving transaction processing, blockchain integrations, distributed systems, data consistency, and scalability. Bring architectural depth to problems where the right solution isn't obvious.
- Challenge assumptions: Identify architectural weaknesses, investigate fundamental problems, research emerging technologies and alternative approaches, and turn your findings into pragmatic, production-ready solutions.
- Engineer security by design: Design systems that preserve critical security guarantees even when individual components are compromised. Strengthen transaction authorization, signing workflows, identity, access control, and trust boundaries.
- Strengthen infrastructure security: Improve the resilience of our cloud infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, software supply chain, and production environments. Reduce reliance on privileged systems and limit the impact of compromised credentials and infrastructure.
- Build high-leverage tooling: Develop automation, reusable infrastructure, and engineering tools that improve security, reliability, and developer productivity.
- Stay deeply hands-on: Personally design, prototype, implement, and troubleshoot critical components. Drive initiatives into production through direct implementation or technical leadership alongside other engineers.
- Raise the engineering bar: Serve as a technical thought partner to the CTO, engineering directors, and tech leads. Mentor senior engineers, challenge technical decisions constructively, and help teams develop stronger independent engineering judgment.
- Advance engineering practices: Explore new technologies, development approaches, and AI-assisted engineering workflows that improve quality, productivity, and the way we build software.
You'll collaborate closely with our backend engineering, cryptography, DevOps, and security teams, operating across organizational and technical boundaries.
Requirements
What you bring
- Extensive hands-on experience designing, building, and operating complex production software systems, with excellent programming skills and a record of significant technical contributions.
- Deep understanding of backend engineering, distributed systems, and software architecture.
- Strong architectural judgment, with the ability to independently tackle ambiguous, technically challenging problems and evaluate competing approaches.
- A security-first mindset, with the ability to reason about threat models, trust boundaries, attack surfaces, and failure scenarios.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, system security, identity, authentication, or authorization.
- The ability to reason across application code, infrastructure, security boundaries, and operational systems, including knowing when specialized expertise is required.
- A proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams without relying on formal managerial authority.
- Strong independent research and problem-solving skills, with the ability to quickly develop deep expertise in unfamiliar technical domains.
- Sound engineering judgment, balancing security, correctness, performance, maintainability, simplicity, and developer productivity.
- Excellent communication skills and the confidence to challenge technical decisions constructively, including those made by senior leadership.
- A genuine passion for hands-on engineering and the desire to continue building, not just designing systems.
Nice to have
- Experience with Go, Rust, C++, or other systems/backend programming languages.
- Experience with GCP, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, or cloud-native architectures.
- Knowledge of software supply-chain security, workload identity, artifact signing, attestation, or secure CI/CD.
- Experience designing security-sensitive financial, identity, authentication, or authorization systems.
- Familiarity with cryptographic protocols, MPC, HSMs, TEEs, or confidential computing.
- Experience with blockchain infrastructure or digital asset systems.
- Experience building internal developer platforms, security automation, or infrastructure tooling.
- Previous experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or technical architect in a highly technical organization.
You don't need to have worked in a dedicated security role or have experience with our exact technology stack. We're particularly interested in exceptional software engineers who have developed strong security expertise through designing, building, and operating critical systems.
Why Join Us?
- Exceptional technical ownership: Take on some of Utila's most challenging engineering problems, with the autonomy to investigate, design, and drive solutions from concept to production.
- Direct collaboration with the CTO: Work closely with our technical leadership on strategic architecture decisions and critical engineering initiatives.
- Company-wide technical influence: Shape the evolution of our platform, security architecture, infrastructure, and engineering practices across teams.
- Deep technical challenges: Work at the intersection of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, security, cryptography, and financial technology, solving problems where correctness and reliability truly matter.
- Stay hands-on: Have significant architectural influence while continuing to design systems, write code, and build production solutions — without moving into people management.
- A strong engineering environment: Collaborate with talented engineers and specialists who value intellectual curiosity, technical excellence, independent thinking, and continuous learning.
- A great place to work: Hybrid schedule with 4 days a week at our Tel Aviv office, an on-site gym, dog-friendly environment, and dedicated parking.
Own the problem. Build the solution. Make your mark.
