Location: Remote - Europe
Remote | Full-time
Compensation: $120K - $200K
We are hiring on behalf of our client, a fast-paced, dynamic, and fully remote team in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 space who is seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer. The employer operates with an ambitious roadmap and a strong commitment to engineering rigor, high-grade security, and rapid execution.
As a Senior Backend Engineer, the selected candidate will play a critical role in designing, developing, and maintaining robust, high-throughput, and scalable backend systems. This role extends beyond writing code to architecting resilient, secure systems optimized for low-latency, real-time processing in financial services.
The ideal candidate brings over eight years of engineering experience, a deep interest in Web3 and DeFi, and a strong dedication to high code quality and state-of-the-art software testing methodologies.
Key Responsibilities
Backend Development
- Design, develop, and maintain core backend systems powering high-throughput trading, exchange, and network infrastructure using clean, efficient, and maintainable code.
- Index on-chain data into event queues and persistence layers to serve WebSockets and scalable APIs consumed by user interfaces and risk dashboards.
System Architecture
- Define the high-level backend structure, data flow, and interactions between components, focusing on event-driven architecture and messaging patterns common in financial systems.
Reliability, Performance & Availability
- Ensure architectural designs meet strict performance, high availability, and reliability standards.
- Implement failover mechanisms, redundancy strategies, and disaster recovery plans to minimize potential downtime.
Security
- Implement and maintain robust security measures to protect backend infrastructure and APIs against DDoS attacks, data breaches, injection vulnerabilities, and other threat vectors.
Data Storage Strategy
- Define data storage strategies and select appropriate databases and models tailored for financial applications.
- Evaluate trade-offs across relational databases, key-value stores, and messaging queues.
Testing Strategy
- Develop and execute a comprehensive testing strategy covering unit, integration, security, load, and performance testing.
- Collaborate with the broader engineering team to establish test reporting and maintain standardized testing processes.
Technological Evaluation & Documentation
- Stay informed on emerging backend technologies, evaluating new tools, frameworks, and methodologies to elevate system performance and scalability.
- Document architectural designs clearly for both technical team members and non-technical stakeholders.
Code Review & Team Collaboration
- Participate in code reviews, mentor engineering team members, and enforce coding standards and best practices.
- Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including on-chain engineers, frontend developers, product managers, quantitative specialists, and executive leadership.
Minimum Qualifications
- Experience: 8+ years of backend engineering experience within the financial services industry.
- Core Languages: 6+ years of hands-on experience using Rust or C++ to build highly scalable web services.
- Concurrency: Mastery of asynchronous programming and advanced concurrency patterns, with an emphasis on thread safety and lock-free data structures.
- Databases: 6+ years of experience designing and maintaining relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL).
- Messaging & Caching: 4+ years of experience with low-latency persistence and messaging technologies (e.g., Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ).
- High Availability: Proven track record of building and maintaining high-availability systems managing significant transaction volumes.
- Security: Strong proficiency in securing and hardening backend systems and APIs against evolving security threats.
- Testing & Cloud: Strong knowledge of software testing methodologies alongside experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and containerization tools (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to work effectively in a collaborative, remote environment.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with low-level network programming, including asynchronous I/O, direct socket programming, and Linux kernel optimizations (e.g., epoll, zero-copy, or kernel bypass techniques).
- Hands-on experience fine-tuning latency-sensitive components in trading systems, such as order-matching engines and risk engines.
- Familiarity with blockchain technology, smart contracts, and decentralized systems.
- Fundamental understanding of finance and derivatives trading.
Ideal Profile Fit
- Comfort operating within a compact, agile team navigating complexity, unknowns, and technical ambiguity.
- Enthusiasm for rapid prototyping, iterative development, and building the future of financial technology.