Software Engineer Backend
NewBe an early applicantSalary: $110,000 – $135,000 per year
About the role - Must have AUSTRALIAN WORKING RIGHTS
You'll join a backend team of engineers, designing, building, and operating the services and APIs behind the platform — HTTP APIs, websockets, and Kafka-driven background workers, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis/Valkey. The platform runs three trading modes that must never bleed into each other: Paper trading (simulated positions marked against live market prices, including stop-loss/take-profit and liquidation), Live trading (real funds on a non-custodial perpetuals DEX; trade records are append-only, with no edits or deletes), and Copy trading (fanning out a trader's executions to followers, with per-follower balances, P&L, and trader payouts).
Key responsibilities
Design, implement, and operate backend APIs and background workers across social and trading services
Produce and consume Kafka events, with retries and idempotency done properly
Write and review PostgreSQL queries, and own the data model for the services you run
Maintain strict separation of balances, P&L, and payouts across the three trading modes
Review pull requests, debug production issues, and ship changes that are safe at scale
Collaborate with backend, mobile, and product engineers on API contracts
Share an on-call rotation with other engineers
About you
4+ years building backend services in production
Production experience with TypeScript/Node.js and/or Python
Strong SQL and PostgreSQL experience
Experience with event-driven systems (message queues or streaming, e.g. Kafka)
Experience designing and operating HTTP APIs
Comfort owning a service in production: debugging, deployments, on-call
Ability to read existing code and extend it without introducing a parallel pattern
About us
Our client runs a social investing platform, currently focused on crypto: users build portfolios and positions, share them publicly, and earn based on performance. They've been operating profitably for five years and are closing a Series A with institutional investors. The team is distributed across the US and Australia.