Backend Trading Systems Engineer
BlockRouteLabs · Remote · Contract
About BlockRouteLabs
At BlockRouteLabs, we build systematic trading infrastructure and strategies for digital asset markets. Our focus spans centralized exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi), and on-chain execution environments. We prioritize transparency, statistical rigor, and real-world performance.
Founded in 2020 and operating as a globally distributed team since 2026, we are a lean team of 11–50 specialists. We trade proprietary capital — internally funded and grown through reinvested trading profits — which keeps us independent, fast-moving, and focused on real results.
About the Role
As a Backend Trading Systems Engineer, you will build and operate the production systems that run our strategies live: market-data ingestion, order routing and execution, position tracking, and real-time risk controls across centralized exchanges and DEXs.
This is money-moving code in a market that never closes — correctness, reliability, and observability come first. You will work closely with the quant and simulation teams to take strategies from research into dependable production systems.
Responsibilities
- Design and build backend services for real-time market-data ingestion, order management, and execution
- Implement and maintain venue integrations, including CEX REST/WebSocket APIs and DEX smart-contract interaction
- Build order-lifecycle management, position tracking, and reconciliation against venue records
- Implement pre-trade and runtime risk controls, including exposure limits, rate limiting, and kill switches
- Engineer for reliability: failover, idempotent order handling, graceful degradation, and safe restarts
- Instrument systems end to end with metrics, structured logging, alerting, and dashboards
- Partner with quant and simulation teams to deploy strategies from research into production
- Contribute to testing standards, code review, incident response, and postmortems
Qualifications
- 4+ years of backend engineering experience building distributed, real-time, or high-throughput systems
- Expert proficiency in at least one of Python, Go, Rust, or C++ [narrow this to your actual stack]
- Hands-on experience with WebSocket/REST API integrations, messaging or streaming systems (e.g., Redis, Kafka, ZeroMQ), and relational or time-series databases
- Strong fundamentals in concurrency, networking, and performance
- Rigor around correctness in systems that handle money: testing, reconciliation, and defensive design
- Ability to communicate clearly and document systems well
Preferred Qualifications
- Direct experience with crypto venues: exchange API integrations (e.g., via CCXT or native clients) or DEX interaction through web3 tooling
- Understanding of on-chain transaction mechanics, including nonce management, gas strategy, and MEV-aware submission (e.g., private relays)
- Prior work on OMS/EMS, market-making, or other latency-sensitive trading systems
- Ability to read Solidity and reason about smart-contract behavior
- Experience operating 24/7 production systems with on-call responsibility
What We Offer
- Ownership of production systems where correctness and uptime directly protect trading capital
- Access to production-grade market data, execution infrastructure, and real trading feedback loops
- A small, senior team with minimal process overhead and fast decision-making
- Compensation tied directly to the quality and impact of your work
Position Details
- Type: Contract (independent contractor), fully remote
- Commitment: Part-time (20 hours per week) or full-time (40 hours per week)
- Term: Initial [3–6 month] engagement, with the option to extend or convert to a longer-term arrangement based on results and mutual fit
- Hours: Flexible, with at least [4] hours of daily overlap with US Eastern Time (ET)
Compensation
- Contract rate of $70–90 per hour (USD), benchmarked against top-tier quant and crypto firms
- Performance-based bonus tied to your impact and overall trading performance
- Equity or token-based incentives, where applicable
Hiring Process
- Intro call (30 minutes) — background, motivation, and mutual fit
- Technical discussion (60–90 minutes) — system design, concurrency, and venue/API integration
- [Paid] coding exercise — a scoped task, such as building a small, well-tested order-handling or market-data service
- Final conversation — logistics, expectations, and offer
We aim to complete the full process within [two to three weeks].
