Principal Engineer, AI Financial Services

About Catena

Catena Labs is building the first AI-native financial institution to provide the new financial infrastructure and services AI systems need to conduct commerce. We’re giving AI agents the tools to identify themselves and use money safely and efficiently. At the same time, we’re providing businesses with a trusted, licensed financial partner with the capability to manage risk and compliance. By building a financial institution with AI and stablecoin infrastructure, we are breaking down the legacy financial system barriers that prevent an AI-driven economy.

Backed by leading venture investors, we’re assembling a team of engineers, designers, data scientists, and finance professionals working together to build a stronger, more resilient global economy that creates broad prosperity. We’re looking for people with the talent, curiosity, and passion to invent an entirely new category of financial services.

The Role

As Principal Engineer, you will be the technical leader responsible for architecting and building the core of our AI-native financial platform. This is a hands-on role that combines deep systems architecture with team leadership. You will own the technical vision and execution for our stablecoin treasury platform, building the critical infrastructure that enables businesses and their AI agents to manage and move money globally, safely, and compliantly.

You will lead a small, high-impact team of engineers, setting the bar for technical excellence and fostering a culture of ownership and rapid execution. You'll be at the frontier of building the next generation of the global financial system.

What You'll Do

• Architect and Build: Lead the design and development of core systems for money management, multi-currency accounts, real-time settlement, and reconciliation across both traditional and blockchain-based financial rails.
  

• Set Technical Vision & Strategy: Own the technical roadmap, make critical architecture decisions, and ensure our platform is secure, scalable, and reliable enough to meet the demands of a regulated financial environment.
  

• Lead and Mentor: Lead a high-performing engineering team, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and fostering a culture of excellence. You will be instrumental in growing the team.
  

• Drive Integrations: Guide the technical integration of bank partners, payment processors, and liquidity providers to enable fast, low-cost, and reliable movement of funds.
  

• Partner Across Functions: Collaborate closely with Product, Legal, and Compliance to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into a clear, executable technical strategy.

Who You Are

• You have 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of leading teams and shipping complex financial products, ideally in payments, treasury, or B2B banking.

• You are a world-class systems architect with deep expertise in payments, settlement networks (both traditional and blockchain), and treasury management systems.

• You have hands-on experience integrating with banks, payment processors, and/or blockchain settlement networks.

• You are adept at building for regulated environments, with a strong understanding of the compliance and risk frameworks essential for B2B financial services (e.g., KYC/KYB, AML, Sanctions).

• You are a proven leader and team builder, capable of setting technical vision, managing a small team, and delivering high-impact products in an early-stage environment.

• You thrive in ambiguity and high-ownership cultures, with a talent for creating clarity and driving solutions to complex, novel problems.

Nice to Haves

• Experience building systems on major cloud providers (Cloudflare, GCP, AWS, Azure).

• Deep expertise in specific blockchain protocols and smart contract development.

• Direct experience with regulatory and compliance audits.

• Contributions to open-source projects in the fintech or crypto space.

Join Us

If you're passionate about pushing the boundaries of what AI agents can do in financial services and want to be part of building the trusted financial infrastructure for the agentic economy, we want to hear from you. You'll have the opportunity to work on challenging problems that have never been solved before, with a team that's defining an entirely new category of financial services.

This is more than a job; it's a chance to be part of the startup team that makes the AI economy possible. Your work will directly enable millions of AI agents to participate safely in commerce, unlocking trillions in economic value and increasing prosperity around the world.