Backend Founding Engineer:
We're helping a brand-new, well-funded fintech company find their first Backend Engineers.
They're building a 24/7 exchange that's set to change how we trade traditional financial stuff – think US stocks, commodities, and currencies, with big leverage options. Their main goal? Make trading super easy, direct, and fair for everyone. This isn't just another startup; it's a chance to join a team from places like Citadel and Tower Research who are genuinely trying to reinvent a huge industry.
As a Founding Backend Engineer, you'll design, build, and own the systems that will soon handle billions of dollars in trades every single day. This is a rare opportunity to work with brilliant minds and really make your mark on financial history.
You'll have a hand in everything crucial, including:
- Creating systems that are always on, super fast, and can handle anything. You'll test them hard to make sure they're perfect.
- Design fault-tolerant, low-latency, always-available services; write load tests and chaos suites; tune until p99 is boring.
- Setting up all the tools and processes (like deployment and monitoring) so future teammates can hit the ground running.
- Helping choose the best tools, set coding rules, and make big decisions about how everything is built as they grow.
- Sharing knowledge, setting a great example for how they work, and helping us hire more amazing engineers.
What We Need From You:
- A degree in a science, tech, engineering, or math field from a top university.
- At least 3+ years building and running online systems that get a lot of traffic or need to be real-time.
- You love the idea of building a culture where we test everything, track performance, and systems keep working even when things go wrong.
- You're confident in yourself and others, and you can make important decisions in minutes, not days.
- You must have UK work authorization and be happy working Monday to Friday from their client's central London office.
- Experience in finance, exchanges, or building super-fast systems.
- Deep knowledge of Kubernetes or automating infrastructure.
- Understanding cybersecurity and compliance rules.
The stack:
- Backend: Python & Rust (in containers), gRPC, Postgres, Redpanda/Kafka, Kubernetes.
- Frontend: React (web) & React Native (iOS/Android), TypeScript, Tailwind, Vite.
- Dev/Infra: GitHub Actions, Terraform, Kubernetes, Grafana, Loki, ArgoCD, AWS.
Contact Ciara Clarke at Harrington Starr for a confidential discussion in this role.
