Job Description

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates. https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/

Senior Backend Engineer (Exchange Infrastructure)

Location: New York, NY
Company Stage: High-Growth / Late-Stage (Marketplace / Fintech)
Office Type: Onsite
Salary: $200,000-$400,000 + Equity

This rapidly scaling fintech marketplace enables users to trade on real-world event outcomes, transforming collective sentiment into real-time, market-driven probabilities. With tens of billions in trading volume and growing adoption as an alternative source of truth, the company is building the next generation of financial and information infrastructure.

The platform operates at the intersection of trading systems, distributed systems, and real-time data—requiring highly performant, reliable, and scalable backend infrastructure to support continued growth.

What You Will Do

• Design and build low-latency, high-throughput backend systems powering the core exchange
• Implement scalable services for order processing, market data, and transaction workflows
• Optimize systems for performance, focusing on latency, throughput, and memory efficiency
• Develop and maintain distributed systems, including APIs, event-driven architectures, and data pipelines
• Debug and resolve production issues in complex, high-performance environments
• Own reliability, availability, and scalability of backend systems
• Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and data teams to ensure seamless system integration
• Contribute to architecture decisions, code quality, and engineering best practices

Ideal Background

• 4–7+ years of backend engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in systems programming languages (C/C++ preferred; Go, Rust, or Java acceptable)
• Deep understanding of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and memory management
• Experience building low-latency, high-throughput systems in production
• Strong debugging skills and comfort working in Linux-based environments
• Proven ability to own systems end-to-end with a focus on correctness and performance
• Bias toward execution and comfort operating in fast-paced, low-bureaucracy environments

Preferred

• Experience in latency-sensitive domains (e.g., trading systems, HFT, gaming, telecom)
• Familiarity with distributed messaging/streaming systems (Kafka, Pulsar, RabbitMQ)
• Experience with gRPC, Protobuf, or similar communication protocols
• Experience deploying systems in cloud environments (AWS/GCP) and working with containers

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive salary + equity
• Unlimited PTO
• Full health, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k) matching
• Company-provided hardware setup
• Opportunity to work on mission-critical infrastructure handling real-money transactions at scale

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive on building high-performance systems—working close to the metal to solve complex distributed systems challenges in a real-time, high-stakes trading environment.

https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/