Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (API) – Economy
Job Overview
VRChat is known as one of the most vibrant social hangout immersive destinations — a place where people gather around shared interests, build communities, host events, and create entirely new worlds and experiences together. With over 250,000 user-created worlds and growing, the platform powers concerts, meetups, performances, niche communities, and creator-run businesses across VR, desktop, and mobile. People connect across time zones and cultures, and entire communities organize their social lives inside VRChat . It’s a live, global creator ecosystem with meaningful scale and long-term momentum.
We have built a team of experienced engineers and product leaders from companies such as Netflix, Meta, Microsoft, Roblox, Google, Amazon, Unity, Spotify, Discord, Twitch, and others. Backed by $100M from Makers Fund, Anthos Capital, and HTC, we’re investing in durable platform infrastructure — including the economic systems that support creators and end-users worldwide.
About the Economy Team
The Economy team designs and operates the systems that power creator monetization and platform-wide transactions. Our work ensures creators can reliably earn income while the platform remains stable, sustainable, and built for long-term growth.
Our team operates with high velocity and high impact—without sacrificing work-life integration. We value technical excellence, mutual respect, and solving hard problems together.
What We're Looking For
We’re looking for a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (API) – Economy to join our Economy team. You will play a foundational role in architecting and evolving the systems that power how creators earn and how users transact across VRChat globally.
This role focuses on building high-integrity backend infrastructure that supports subscriptions, digital ownership, creator monetization, payment processing, and economic analytics at global scale. You’ll work primarily with Node.js and TypeScript, designing systems where correctness, auditability, reliability, and compliance are non-negotiable.
If you’re excited about building financial-grade systems for a thriving global creator ecosystem, this role could be the perfect fit.
We build and scale:
- VRC+ subscription infrastructure
- Central and avatar marketplaces
- First-party and creator-driven digital content systems
- Digital credits, wallets, inventory, ownership, and subscription models
- Creator payouts and reconciliation
- Monetization events and purchase flows
- Economic analytics and reporting
- Internal and external tooling supporting creators and platform teams
What You'll Do:
- Design and implement scalable backend services in Node.js and TypeScript
- Ensure transactional integrity in high-volume economic systems
- Model digital ownership, entitlements, wallets, and payouts
- Build and evolve systems supporting both first-party and creator-driven content
- Drive refactors that improve maintainability and long-term platform evolution
- Participate in architectural discussions shaping the future of VRChat ’s economy stack
- Design reliable economic event representations
- Ensure traceability across payment transactions and reporting systems
- Enable subscription and marketplace analytics
- Support experimentation and feature iteration
- Maintain reconciliation accuracy and reporting integrity
- Contribute to fraud detection and prevention systems
- Own services from development through deployment and monitoring
- Improve CI/CD reliability and release safety
- Work within containerized environments (Docker)
- Contribute to Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Strengthen observability, monitoring, and incident response practices
- Occasionally jump in to resolve critical production issues
Senior-Level Expectations
- Design and implement scalable backend services
- Own systems end-to-end through production
- Improve performance, observability, and operational resilience
- Partner cross-functionally with