JOB Post Senior Backend / Systems Engineer (0-to-1) – Arcade

Arcade is building high-performance, low-latency decentralized exchange (DEX) infrastructure designed for demanding financial workloads.
We are looking for an elite, battle-tested Senior Backend / Systems Engineer who can take ownership of our core financial backend from 0-to-1 and help scale it to production.
This is a founding-level engineering role with significant technical ownership.
The Challenge
We need an experienced backend systems engineer who can independently architect, build, deploy, optimize, and operate a high-throughput financial backend.
The target is to build infrastructure capable of supporting $100M+ in daily trading volume within the first two months, while maintaining reliability, correctness, and extremely low latency in a live production environment.
Key Responsibilities
1. 0-to-1 Backend Architecture
Design and build core backend services from scratch.
Develop high-throughput order management and execution systems.
Use Rust or Go for mission-critical backend services.
Make architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, concurrency, and fault tolerance.
2. Financial Infrastructure
Build reliable financial state primitives, including:
Double-entry ledger systems
Transaction reconciliation
Idempotency mechanisms
Replay-safe transaction processing
Balance and settlement systems
Transaction integrity and consistency mechanisms
3. Performance & Scalability
Optimize PostgreSQL and database access patterns.
Optimize memory usage and concurrent execution pipelines.
Design systems capable of handling very high throughput.
Target sub-millisecond p99 latency where technically appropriate.
Identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks through profiling and benchmarking.
4. Production Ownership
Deploy and operate mission-critical backend services.
Maintain high availability and system reliability.
Diagnose and resolve production incidents quickly.
Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and operational safeguards.
Take end-to-end ownership of backend reliability.
Must-Have Qualifications
Production Backend Experience
5+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
Strong experience designing and operating production-grade systems.
Demonstrated ability to own complex backend architecture.
Rust or Go
Strong production experience with Rust or Go.
Must have deployed mission-critical services using Rust or Go in production.
CRUD-only applications and basic side projects do not qualify.
Financial / Crypto Systems
Hands-on experience with at least one of:
Trading engines
Cryptocurrency exchanges
Payment systems
Financial transaction infrastructure
Crypto wallets
Double-entry accounting/ledger systems
High-volume money movement systems
Proven Scale
Candidates should be able to provide real production metrics from previous systems, such as:
Daily/monthly transaction or financial volume
Peak RPS
Concurrent users
p95/p99 latency
Database throughput
Availability/SLA
System scale and architecture
Please include these metrics in your proposal wherever possible.
0-to-1 Startup Experience
Experience as a founding engineer or early-stage technical owner.
Comfortable taking a product from architecture → implementation → deployment → production.
Able to work independently and make critical engineering decisions without extensive supervision.
Comfortable operating in a fast-moving startup environment.
Timezone
Must be able to maintain regular working-hour overlap with either:
North American time zones, or
European time zones.
Not a Fit If You Are
Please do not apply if your experience is primarily limited to:
Smart Contracts / Solidity
Frontend development
Data Science / ML
QA / Testing
Pure DevOps / Infrastructure
Web2 CRUD applications
E-commerce platforms
Basic SaaS applications
Agency-only or consultancy work
Outsourcing-only experience
Short-term freelance projects without significant ownership
Corporate/FAANG/banking experience without meaningful 0-to-1 startup ownership
We are specifically looking for someone who has personally built and operated complex production systems, not someone who has only contributed to them as part of a large team.
What We Expect From Your Proposal
Please include:
Years of backend engineering experience
Rust/Go production experience
One or two examples of financial, trading, crypto, or payment systems you have built
Your largest production system and its approximate:
Daily volume
Peak RPS
User/concurrency scale
p99 latency
Your experience building systems from 0-to-1
Your preferred stack and why
Your timezone and available working-hour overlap
GitHub / portfolio / relevant technical references, if available
Generic proposals will be ignored.
Engagement
This is a senior, high-ownership engineering position. We are looking for someone who can become a core technical contributor to Arcade and take genuine ownership of the backend infrastructure.
If you have built high-scale financial or crypto infrastructure in Rust or Go and are confident operating mission-critical systems, we would like to hear from you.
Apply with specific technical details and measurable production results.