FK01 - Staff Backend Engineer
Application
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About the Company
The client is building a production-grade prediction market platform operating in a high-throughput, low-latency trading environment. The system powers live markets with real users and real operational constraints. While the platform integrates with blockchain-based settlement mechanisms, the core engineering challenges center on scaling, correctness, and reliability of a real-time trading engine. This is a production-first engineering environment, where decisions are validated by system behavior under load—not by theoretical architecture.
About the Project
We are supporting a team responsible for scaling and hardening a mission-critical trading engine already running in production. The focus is on evolving an existing system to improve:
- Throughput and latency under volatile load
- Reliability, failure recovery, and correctness
- Observability and operational clarity The platform combines an off-chain matching engine, distributed state management, and external settlement integrations.
About the Role
We are looking for a Staff / Principal Backend Engineer (Systems Architecture Focus) to take hands-on ownership of a high-performance trading engine and its surrounding infrastructure. This is not a framework-centric role. While the core backend is written in NestJS, exceptional candidates with deep experience in Rust or Go are strongly encouraged to apply—even if they are not experts in NestJS. Architectural authority in this role comes from building and operating systems, not from familiarity with a specific framework. Blockchain experience is optional, not required.
Role and Responsibilities
- Own and evolve the architecture of a high-throughput, low-latency trading engine in production.
- Scale system throughput and reliability through concrete improvements to:
- Data models and state representation
- Concurrency, batching, and message flow
- Failure handling and recovery paths
- Design and operate external settlement integrations, including:
- Idempotency
- State reconciliation
- Fault tolerance
- Build and maintain production-grade observability:
- Metrics, tracing, logging, and alerting used in real incidents
- Design, partition, and scale PostgreSQL based on real access patterns and growth.
- Define and enforce distributed systems standards:
- Consistency models
- Backpressure, retries, and fault tolerance
- Guide the team by reviewing real code and implementing complex components alongside them.
- Personally implement or refactor performance-critical paths when required.
What We’re Looking For
Must-Haves
- Proven experience scaling high-throughput, low-latency systems in production.
- Strong background in trading engines or real-time distributed systems.
- Deep understanding of:
- Order books, matching, settlement, batching
- State consistency under failure
- Demonstrated ability to optimize systems at a low level:
- Concurrency models
- Data structures
- Memory and network paths
- Hands-on, production experience with:
- Kafka (mandatory)
- Redis (mandatory)
- Real-world experience scaling PostgreSQL:
- Performance tuning
- Partitioning strategies
- Strong backend engineering background in one or more of:
- NestJS / Node.js
- Rust
- Go
- Practical, operations-first engineering mindset
- Comfortable being accountable for systems after they ship
- B2/C1 English level
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with prediction markets, exchanges, or financial platforms
- Experience operating systems under volatile or bursty load
- Familiarity with cloud-scale infrastructure
- Any exposure to blockchain-based settlement or on-chain integrations (optional)
Tech Stack (Current)
- Backend: NestJS (Node.js)
- Frontend: Next.js
- Database: PostgreSQL
- Messaging: Kafka (mandatory)
- Caching / State: Redis (mandatory)
- Languages in Use: TypeScript
- Additional Accepted Languages: Rust, Go (for candidates with strong systems background)
Why This Role Is Exciting
- Ownership of a live, high-performance trading platform
- Real systems engineering problems—not framework-driven work
- Complex challenges around latency, correctness, and failure recovery
- Work with strong engineers who value production reality
- Competitive compensation and equity for engineers who want real responsibility and impact
Application Instructions
Submit everything [here]:
- Your résumé/CV highlighting systems, trading, or distributed backend experience
- Examples of systems you’ve scaled and operated in production
- Your availability and compensation expectations