---
title: 'Senior Backend Engineer at Daylight'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-backend-engineer-daylight-new-york-hvtbszp7g8hr'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Senior Backend Engineer at Daylight

- **Company:** Daylight
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Posted:** 2025-03-12
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/daylight/jobs/4574421008

## Job description

## About Daylight

Daylight is the decentralized energy company. We're building a protocol that converts distributed solar and storage systems into yield-bearing infrastructure. These assets are deployed behind the meter in American homes and businesses, generating electricity revenues that flow onchain as a single, liquid yield token. Our ambition is to build the economic engine for energy abundance—where capital fuels power, and power fuels everything.

Our team brings together energy and crypto veterans who believe in a future where communities power themselves. Backed by a16z, Framework, and other industry-leading investors, we're building the infrastructure to make that vision a reality. Learn more at [www.godaylight.com](http://www.godaylight.com)

## The Role

As a Senior Backend Developer at Daylight, you'll play a crucial role in developing our Django APIs and backend services that support our mobile app and partner integrations. You'll build functionality that helps homeowners monitor, control, and optimize their energy usage while participating in our decentralized energy network.

We're an early-stage startup, so this role goes beyond just writing code. You'll have significant input on architecture decisions, user experience, and product direction. As we scale, there will be opportunities to grow into a leadership or management position, mentoring junior developers and shaping our mobile development strategy.

This role is ideal for someone who is passionate about crypto and clean energy, values craftsmanship in their code, and thrives in dynamic startup environments where your work has a direct impact on the product's success and the company's mission.

This role is in-person in our New York City office.

## Responsibilities

- GraphQL & REST API Development
- Design and build robust GraphQL queries and mutations that power our mobile app and are tailored for mobile performance
- Architect, develop, and maintain scalable API endpoints that support vendor/partner integrations
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define, design, and ship innovative features
- Continuously monitor performance and resolve bottlenecks and bugs across all endpoints
- Champion code quality, automation, and comprehensive testing practices
- CRM & Internal Tools Development
- Leverage and extend Django’s admin interface to build a feature-rich internal CRM and administration portal
- Customize the Django admin site to meet evolving business and workflow needs
- Work with stakeholders to refine internal processes and drive user-friendly administrative solutions
- Technical Architecture & DevOps
- Contribute to architecture planning and drive technical design decisions that ensure scalability and security
- Optimize the application stack for maximum speed and reliability
- Embrace CI/CD methodologies and infrastructure-as-code practices to streamline deployments
- Evaluate and integrate emerging technologies that enhance our backend ecosystem

## What we’re looking for

| Must Haves

- 3+ years of experience developing APIs and backend services
- Strong understanding of API Development and best practices
- Experience with Python, Django, PostgreSQL and Redis
- Proficiency in writing clean, readable, and well-documented code
- Experience with REST APIs, GraphQL, and network request handling
- Familiarity with version control systems, particularly Git
- Knowledge of backend performance profiling and optimization techniques
- Experience with testing and managing AWS infrastructure and Kubernetes
- Ability to work in a fast-paced environment with changing requirements
- Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail

| Nice to Haves

- Experience with Celery, Django admin sites, integrating with smart contracts
- Familiarity with crypto and related infrastructure, specifically EVM
- Experience with continuous integration and delivery processes
- Contributions to open-source projects
- Understanding of energy markets and renewable energy systems

## What we offer

- Competitive salary and equity package
- Opportunity to shape a category-defining product from the ground up
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
- Wellhub membership
- Monthly wellness stipend

Daylight values diversity and welcomes applications from all qualified candidates. We're building technology that serves everyone, and we believe diverse perspectives make our team and our product stronger.

## About Daylight

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Daylight provides a personalized "onchain for you" API that powers recommendation feeds in major crypto wallets, telling users what mints, claims, quests, and other transactions they can perform.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage; $9M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (169 Madison Avenue, Suite 2726)
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Kyle McCollom (CEO) and Morley Zhi (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Web3 / Crypto Infrastructure; Internet Publishing
- **Target customers**: B2B — crypto wallets (Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, Zerion, OKX Web3 Wallet, etc.), creator tools (PartyDAO, Highlight, Zora), and other "address-aware" applications.
- **Mission statement**: To drive 5% of all onchain GDP by powering the front doors of the onchain world with personalized discovery.

## Products & Services
- **Daylight API**: A REST API that serves tens of thousands of requests per second, summarizing millions of rows of offchain data and terabytes of onchain data in under 750ms. It provides personalized transaction recommendations (mints, claims, quests, dapps, swaps) to wallet apps, driving 5% of their transacting users. It functions as a "home tab" or "explore tab" for wallets, akin to Netflix or Spotify recommendations but for onchain actions.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $9M (as of September 2024)
- **Annual Revenue**: $750,000 (estimated private data)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Union Square Ventures (USV, lead in latest round), 1kx (co-lead), Framework Ventures, Chapter One, Eniac, 6th Man Ventures, Seed Club Ventures, OpenSea, Spice Capital, Uncommon Projects, and angels including evgeny.eth (Zerion co-founder), vadim.eth (Zerion co-founder), corbin.eth (early Consensys), idobn.eth (Blockaid co-founder), razniv.eth (Blockaid co-founder), nir.eth (Yup co-founder), and Shreyas Hariharan (Llama co-founder).
- **Growth Signals**: Reaches over 6 million active addresses monthly; powers the home/discover tabs of major wallets (Coinbase Wallet, MetaMask, Zerion, OKX Web3 Wallet); recently raised a $6M seed round led by USV (Sep 2024); hiring staff-level backend engineers to scale from 6M to tens of millions of monthly addresses.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Network effects**: As the most widely integrated recommendation engine for crypto wallets, every new wallet partner increases Daylight's user reach and data, improving recommendation quality.
- **First-mover in "ability feeds"**: Building the infrastructure layer for personalized onchain discovery, a category that is new and sticky.
- **Open, composable value chain**: Crypto's permissionless referral flows allow Daylight to earn protocol rewards (e.g., from Zora mints) and share them with distribution partners without needing contractual agreements, creating a more efficient value chain than web2 equivalents.
- **Deep wallet integrations**: Already embedded in the majority of wallet apps, creating a high switching cost for partners.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale infrastructure**: Expand from 6M monthly addresses to tens of millions by hiring staff-level backend engineers.
- **Expand recommendation categories**: Move beyond mints, quests, and claims into new transaction types (e.g., swaps, voting, token-gated experiences).
- **Leverage offchain data**: Use offchain data to improve the recommendation algorithm and personalization.
- **Expand to more surfaces**: Power discovery in any "address-aware" application beyond wallets.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture highlights**: Team believes in prioritizing problems that most impact the goal, minimizing distractions, writing good tests, communicating openly and directly, and having everyone (especially engineers) think about product and API design from the customer's perspective.
- **Remote/hybrid policy**: NYC and Remote — offers flexibility.
- **Notable perks or engineering culture**: Small, highly focused team (3 employees currently); you'll work on "meat-and-potatoes" software engineering problems (scaling REST APIs, optimizing PostgreSQL, tracing code paths on AWS); directly impact the core product and mission; backed by top-tier VCs (USV, 1kx) and industry angels; the founders have deep crypto and web2 experience (Stellar, OkCupid).

## Sources
1. [LinkedIn - Daylight](https://www.linkedin.com/company/daylightxyz)
2. [CB Insights - Daylight](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/daylight-1)
3. [Kyle McCollom blog - Daylight Raises $6M](https://www.kylemccollom.com/p/daylight-raises-6m-from-usv-1kx)
4. [Hello We3 - Daylight Profile](https://companies.hello-we3.com/company/daylight)
5. [Union Square Ventures - Daylight](https://blog.usv.com/daylight)

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