Rust Engineer, Trading Systems
The role
We are not filling a headcount slot. We want the person to own the trading systems side of a young market data and trading infrastructure business, with the door open to becoming a partner.
We are building a Rust market data and trading infrastructure platform. Several venues are already live in the capture pipeline, across CEXs, DEXs and prediction markets, and expanding that coverage is the bulk of the near-term work. Full-depth order books and trades, normalised so one integration serves many venues, on columnar storage with an analytical query layer over it.
What you would own
Venue connectivity end to end, from feed through normalisation, gap detection and replay. The shared abstraction every venue fits behind, which will either hold or turn into a special case per venue. Correctness of the capture path, including the boring parts that decide whether a backtest is trustworthy. Execution components as they come online. Read-side today, but it is on the path. Operability, since nobody hands off support to another team here. Technical direction in your area. You argue the trade-off, you make the call, you live with it.
Who we are looking for
We're looking for someone with a deep interest in trading and market dynamics. Proficiency in Rust, especially async and Tokio, is essential, and so is a solid grasp of multithreading and concurrency. Hands-on experience with market data or trading systems, such as exchange feeds, order books and exchange APIs, counts for a lot. You should be able to critically evaluate code changes and anticipate their long-term impact. Break down your own work into actionable tasks and prioritise them effectively. Experience with exchanges, market making, order execution, time-series storage such as ClickHouse or Parquet, or AWS/Linux performance work is a plus.
Seniority and time
We are not labelling this junior or senior. What matters is whether you can carry a component without much direction. Learning the trading domain here is fine.
The first three months are a full-time probation period. After that we can talk about a partnership and other ways of working together, part-time included.
How we hire
- A logical reasoning test, around 40 minutes. Abstract pattern matching, no coding.
- A bug fix. You get a small exercise repository with a bug ticket and a pull request that tries to fix it. Review it as you would a teammate's, and if its fix falls short, write your own. You have 72 hours from the moment you accept the invitation.
- If your bug fix holds up, a 45-minute call. We get to know each other first, and then go through your review and your fix together.
What we can offer
You would build the thing rather than maintain someone else's version of it. Venue connectivity, capture guarantees, ordering and state under failure, and execution once the read side is solid. Not many engineers get to work on a system like this, and the experience is hard to acquire any other way.
The data comes with it. Full depth across every venue we capture, yours to research against. Buying comparable history costs real money, and most engineers who want to test an idea properly never get near it.
Pay is $1,000 a month, for the three-month probation only. That is the real figure, not a placeholder. We know it is well below what an experienced Rust engineer earns elsewhere, and we would rather say so here than have you find out at the end of the process. After probation, a partnership may follow for the right person, with a share of the revenue once there is any, and pay from then on is part of that conversation.
How to apply
Please put your GitHub username in your cover letter (for example, GitHub: octocat). We use it to send you the bug-fix task.