Senior Backend Engineer; Rust; SF

Our client is a well-funded crypto trading startup ($15M+ raised) building a unified trading platform that lets retail traders access perpetuals, cross-chain spot, and prediction markets across multiple venues from a single portfolio-margined account. The founding team previously built the market-leading order execution platform for crypto retail traders (90%+ market share, $900B+ in lifetime volume) and ran one of the top on-chain and centralized exchange HFT firms in the industry.

The team is 10 people, deeply technical, and works in person in San Francisco.

They're hiring a Backend Engineer to build the core infrastructure behind their real-time trading platform. This is a high-ownership seat on a small team where your systems will directly move and protect user capital.

You’ll build and maintain the risk and liquidation engines that manage exposure and improve capital efficiency in volatile markets, and design the blockchain state machines that power trading, settlement, and risk operations. You’ll develop services that keep state consistent across asynchronous processes using voting, consensus, and coordination mechanisms, process live market data while coordinating actions across trading venues over Web Socket streams, and build high-performance REST and Web Socket APIs with millisecond-level response times.

Strong backend experience in Rust, C++, or Go, with production Rust experience a plus. Engineers coming from C++ or Go should have genuine interest in moving to Rust, since it’s the core of the stack. You’ll need a strong command of asynchronous programming, solid distributed systems fundamentals, and a performance-driven mindset. Experience with blockchain or on-chain systems, trading infrastructure, risk systems, or market data pipelines is highly valued.

You should thrive in a high-bandwidth, collaborative, in-person environment.

Rust, Tokio, distributed systems, blockchain, REST and Web Socket APIs, Docker