Senior Software Engineer, Core

Institutional Fabric for the Digital Asset Market

Founded in 2018, Talos provides institutional-grade trading technology for the global digital asset market, powering many of the major players in the crypto ecosystem. Our mission is clear: to advance the mass adoption of digital assets by seamlessly connecting institutions to the digital asset ecosystem. We are committed to building the most innovative and trusted platform in the world, supporting the entire trading lifecycle.

At Talos, you’ll find an environment that champions kindness and respect, values diverse perspectives, and upholds inclusivity at every turn. We believe every member of our team brings invaluable insights and abilities that drive Talos forward. In our pursuit of excellence, we foster a culture of trust, integrity, collaboration, and mutual growth.

We are a tight-knit yet globally distributed team of highly experienced engineers and business leaders, with hubs in New York, London, Singapore, and Cyprus. You’ll be part of a hybrid-friendly environment where your unique talents and insights will play a crucial role in building something extraordinary.

Talos is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Core team, focused on building and maintaining the foundational platform infrastructure that powers the entire Talos trading ecosystem.

This role centers on high-performance, distributed systems engineering: designing low-latency messaging infrastructure using Aeron, building and evolving the API layers (FIX, Web Socket, REST) consumed by product teams across the firm, and maintaining the sequencer and market data distribution pipelines that sit at the heart of Talos’ architecture. You will work on deeply technical problems at the intersection of distributed systems, financial protocols, and infrastructure reliability.

This is an opportunity to go deep on platform craft — shaping the infrastructure that every team at Talos builds on, and solving problems where the margin for error is low and the design space is wide open.

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance platform services including API gateways (FIX, Web Socket, REST), and the core libraries that product teams across Talos build on.
• Build and evolve Aeron-based messaging infrastructure for reliable, low-latency communication.
• Tackle hard distributed systems problems end-to-end: ordering and determinism guarantees, zero-downtime deployments, active-active architectures spanning cloud regions, and crash-consistent recovery.
• Work cross-functionally to ensure platform primitives meet the throughput and latency requirements of real-time trading workflows, including market data distribution at scale.
• Provide product teams with reusable service infrastructure to build scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient services.

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with deep proficiency in Go, C++, Java, Rust or similar systems languages.
• Demonstrated ownership of large-scale distributed systems, from initial design through deployment, scaling, and long-term operations.
• Strong systems-level fundamentals: concurrency primitives, memory layout, I/O models, database design, network protocols, and the performance implications of each.
• Experience designing systems with stringent correctness guarantees — ordering, consistency, durability — not just ones that work under normal conditions.
• Own projects end-to-end: take work from problem definition through design, implementation, and rollout, and see it through to completion without needing to be chased.
• Track record of leading technical decisions: navigating ambiguity, defining architecture, making meaningful trade-offs, and bringing a team along on the reasoning.
• Comfortable operating at multiple levels of abstraction, from API contract design down to diagnosing latency spikes at the socket or disk layer.

• Experience with Aeron or comparable low-latency messaging frameworks (e.g., Chronicle, LMAX Disruptor, ZeroMQ).
• Hands-on experience building geo-distributed or multi-site systems with active-active replication and regional failover.
• Familiarity with FIX protocol (4.x/5.x) or…