Staff+ Founding Backend Engineer, Platform

About the company

Our client is a self-funded crypto trading startup, founded in 2026 by the team behind a leading decentralized exchange, building a mobile-first trading app for professional and high-volume traders — spot, perpetuals, and tokenized stocks and commodities in one place. The founders ran their previous exchange to several million dollars of revenue in its first year with two full-time people, and they are deliberately not raising: the company is six people today, flat, and intends to stay self-funded. The engineering team is three founding engineers plus a product lead and the hiring manager, working mostly async.

The role

You would be the founding backend owner of everything except money movement, designing the 0-to-1 architecture for very large data volumes and sudden bursts. In the first weeks that means wiring up third-party market-data and wallet providers with sensible backups so the app has data at all; after that it means replacing them with your own Solana and EVM indexing, and building the WebSocket fanout that pushes live prices and position updates to every open app. Underneath sits PostgreSQL on AWS or GCP, which you would be responsible for keeping fast and correct when volume spikes. This is a hands-on individual-contributor seat at staff level or above: the hiring manager wants someone who has run a consumer trading backend in production and can point to the incidents they handled, not someone who will manage people.

What you'll do

• Own the backend platform end to end — everything except money movement — as the founding backend engineer
• Design the 0-to-1 architecture for high data volumes and sharp traffic bursts
• Wire up third-party market-data and wallet providers with fallbacks, then replace them with in-house indexing
• Build production Solana and EVM on-chain data indexing end to end
• Build WebSocket fanout that pushes live prices and position updates to every connected client
• Keep PostgreSQL and the serving and caching layer fast and correct under load, including cache stampedes
• Reconcile data providers that disagree with each other, and decide what to shed when a spike hits

Nice to have

• A background at an exchange, a trading firm, or in trading-bot development
• Experience with perpetuals or derivatives venues as well as spot trading
• Having worked on a small founding team where you chose the architecture yourself

Tech stack

Rust or Go for the backend — the hiring manager leans Rust, and Go-only is a mild minus rather than a blocker — with PostgreSQL, AWS or GCP, WebSockets at scale, and Solana or EVM indexing. The front end is React Native and Expo, so you would be serving a mobile client. The specific bar is production depth: the team wants engineers who have built and operated their own on-chain ingestion pipeline, not engineers who extended someone else's.

Compensation & logistics

• $225k–$300k base, plus 1.5–2% equity on a four-year vest with a one-year cliff, plus a performance bonus
• Fully remote from the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe, South Korea or Singapore; North American or European time zones are preferred and Eastern is ideal, and the team works mostly async
• The client cannot sponsor or transfer a visa, so you need to be legally authorized to work in the US and not need visa sponsorship or a visa transfer now or in the future, or already be authorized to work in one of the other locations listed above
• You need to be free to join with no active non-compete — this is checked early, because it has ended a late-stage conversation before
• One hire on this role, and the need is immediate
• Interview process: a 30-minute screening call about what you have built and run in production, a 60-minute systems design interview, then a paid eight-hour take-home day, before an offer
• Full-time