Backend Engineer, Trading Systems
The Opportunity
As a Backend Engineer on the Nascent engineering team, you will design and build the next generation of our world-class trading system. You’ll take ownership of critical components, including design, implementation, and maintenance, and integrate directly with financial exchanges. From developing backend architecture in Rust to rigorous code reviews and testing, you’ll champion quality engineering practices across your work. Along the way, you’ll bring structure to ambiguous problems, help shape system architecture and interface design, and serve as an integral partner to our trading team.
You’ll thrive in this role if you love having the freedom to move fast, think creatively, and solve tough problems with a builder’s mindset. You care deeply about doing things right without getting bogged down, you’re comfortable adapting quickly as requirements evolve, and you find as much joy in starting a project as you do in refining and optimizing it over time. If you’re excited to dive deep into Rust, contribute to complex and iterative system development, and help shape the future of trading and crypto, we’d love to work with you. This is a remote position with opportunities for in-person collaboration, requiring core working hours within 5 hours of Eastern Standard Time.
Responsibilities
- Architect, design and build the next phase of a world-class trading system.
- Support development and implementation of a backend, microservice-driven, Rust architecture.
- Ensure resilience and stability through quality code reviews, unit, regression and user acceptance testing, and apply and be a proponent of quality engineering practices.
- Use documentation and specifications to build integrations between selected exchanges and our internal systems.
- Take full ownership of multiple components including design, implementation, and maintenance.
- Bring clarity and structure to ambiguous problems, identifying key requirements and proposing actionable solutions.
- Contribute to system architecture and interface design.
About you
- You crave autonomy and agency to deliver against a shared vision and find real joy in providing solutions to complex problems
- You are resourceful and can toe the line between moving fast and breaking things and moving methodically to get things right the first time
- You are as excited by starting a project as you are completing, maintaining and continually optimizing it
- You proactively contribute creative ideas and novel approaches to product and engineering challenges, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
- You are extremely agile and have a strong ability to adapt quickly to evolving requirements.
- You thrive in less structured environments and are at your best when driving and delivering results with the freedom to build and execute your own plan
Preferred experience
- 2-8 years of full-time software engineering experience, ideally as a systems programmer (Rust, C++, GO). Bonus if you have experience with and/or interest in learning Rust.
- Experience beyond testing (e.g. quality processes, verification & validation)
- Experience building scalable, performant, production-level applications with regular release cycles
- Performance sensitive engineering including multi-threading, streaming data, and concurrency
- Distributed systems, micro services
- Experience building trading systems is a strong plus, with an interest in and enthusiasm for financial markets or the crypto space.
About Nascent…
Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We've made venture investments in 100+ early-stage teams that we believe have the potential to create substantive change, expand boundaries, and find new horizons. We are consistently on the hunt for the most competitive and curious minds exploring the edges of the crypto ecosystem and leverage our hyper flexible structure to accelerate ideas into fully deployed strategies.
Our Team & Culture
At Nascent, we are an interdisciplinary team of investors, builders & creators, capable of achieving more together than we can as individuals. We offer the opportunity to contribute to building the future global economic system with a world-class team and culture that pairs the freedom to explore, experiment & play with a competitive drive to win. We invest in our people by providing the autonomy to build, coupled with accountability & honest feedback to help learn, grow, perform & win. Our distributed team understands the value of in-person time—we encourage team members to come together for more frequent in-person work.
Principles that drive our team & work
- Compete to win
- Explore, experiment, play
- Always be building
- Seek and speak truth
- Own your shit.
What We Offer
At Nascent, we offer a competitive total compensation package heavily weighted toward bonus, ensuring that when we perform at our best and the firm wins we all win.
- The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment
- Remote and distributed working environment
- Comprehensive health benefits package including dental, vision, and life
- 16 weeks fully paid parental leave & supported return to work
- Home office setup and stipend or coworking space and wellness stipend
- Retirement plan matching contributions
- Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location
- Team activities and in-person team retreats
We are an equal opportunity employer and celebrate diversity and differences of perspectives. We do not discriminate on the basis of any status, inclusive of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.