Backend Engineer

About Astera

Astera is building the canonical intelligence and execution layer for event‑driven markets. Our platform connects prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and broader real‑world event systems into a unified intelligence and decision infrastructure powered by multimodal AI, world models, and real‑time market reasoning.

• multimodal agent architectures
• institutional‑grade APIs for both consumer and B2B products

This is not a conventional backend role. The systems being built sit at the intersection of:

• distributed systems
• AI‑native applications

We are hiring a Founding Backend & Systems Engineer to architect and build the core infrastructure powering Astera’s consumer platform, intelligence systems, and institutional APIs.

You will own critical backend and systems layers including:

• streaming infrastructure
• distributed event systems
• multimodal inference pipelines
• production reliability

You should be capable of operating across:

• systems architecture
• infrastructure
• performance optimization
• data‑intensive distributed systems

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive building performance‑critical systems under real‑world scale and latency constraints.

• Architect and build low‑latency backend systems powering real‑time consumer products
• Design distributed systems for ingesting, processing, and serving massive multimodal datasets
• Build scalable APIs for both consumer applications and institutional B2B offerings
• Develop infrastructure connecting prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and external event streams
• Optimize systems for latency, throughput, reliability, and fault tolerance
• Build production infrastructure supporting multimodal AI and agentic systems
• Develop data pipelines for real‑time and historical market/event processing
• Work closely with AI, product, and quant teams to product ionize research systems
• Own deployment, observability, reliability, and backend performance across the platform
• Design systems capable of scaling to institutional‑grade workloads and API usage

• Strong backend and distributed systems engineering experience
• Experience building low‑latency or performance‑critical systems
• Strong programming ability in languages such as:
  • Go
  • Rust
  • C++
  • Python
  • Type Script/Node.js
• Deep understanding of:
  • concurrency
  • networking
  • distributed systems
  • databases
  • caching
  • systems performance
• Experience designing scalable APIs and data‑intensive backend services
• Strong understanding of production infrastructure and cloud‑native systems
• Experience working with large‑scale datasets and streaming architectures
• Ability to operate independently in high‑ambiguity startup environments

• High‑throughput distributed systems
• Event streaming
• Real‑time market systems
• Exchange infrastructure
• Performance‑critical backend environments

• Kafka
• Pulsar
• Click House
• Redis
• Timescale
• OLAP systems

• Inference orchestration
• RAG systems
• Agentic systems
• GPU‑aware infrastructure

• High‑scale consumer applications
• Trading systems
• Social/discovery products
• Event‑driven applications

• Institutional APIs
• SDKs
• Enterprise integrations
• Highly reliable external‑facing infrastructure

• Go
• Rust
• C++
• Python
• Node.js/Type Script

• Docker
• GCP / AWS
• Terraform
• gRPC
• NATS
• Kafka
• Redis

• Click House
• Timescale DB
• Elasticsearch
• OLAP systems

• PyTorch inference systems
• Ray
• Lang Graph
• Streaming inference pipelines
• GPU‑aware orchestration
• Distributed ML serving systems

• Strong systems intuition
• High engineering rigor
• Deep performance awareness
• Reasoning about scale, latency, and reliability
• Ownership mentality
• Comfort operating under ambiguity
• Pragmatic engineering judgment
• Interest in frontier AI‑native systems

We care far more about technical depth and systems thinking than pedigree.

• High‑frequency trading infrastructure
• Exchange systems
• Real‑time analytics platforms
• Quantitative finance infrastructure
• Distributed databases
• Large‑scale consumer applications
• Autonomous systems infrastructure
• Streaming media systems
• Space/aerospace systems
• Performance‑critical robotics infrastructure

• Meaningful equity participation
• Opportunity to help architect foundational infrastructure from day one

NYC

• Resume / Linked In
• Git Hub or technical portfolio
• Representative systems or infrastructure projects

Ad Astra