Functional Software Engineer

Obsidian Systems

About The Position

Obsidian Systems is a software engineering consultancy that builds production systems for capital markets and other regulated industries. Its clients include market infrastructure providers, national exchanges, and global financial institutions. Much of the company’s work centers on the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled blockchain adopted by major capital markets institutions. The Functional Software Engineer will contribute to client projects across technical domains, designing, developing, and maintaining software using functional programming principles. The work may involve backend systems, domain modelling, distributed systems, financial infrastructure, blockchain applications, or developer tooling. The role emphasizes reasoning about complex systems, strong types, clear abstractions, sound technical judgment, and collaboration with engineers and client teams.

Requirements

Professional experience developing and delivering production software.
Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, testing, and software design.
Experience with functional programming, professionally or through substantial projects.
Ability to reason about complex problems and translate requirements into well-structured software.
Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
Commitment to code quality, correctness, and maintainability.
Ability to communicate effectively and collaborate with other engineers.
Willingness to learn new technologies and work across different technical environments.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Haskell, Scala, OCaml, F#, Clojure, or another functional programming language.
Familiarity with type systems, algebraic data types, pattern matching, and immutable data structures.
Experience with strongly typed domain modelling and functional design patterns.
Exposure to distributed systems, concurrent programming, or backend infrastructure.
Experience in blockchain, financial infrastructure, capital markets, or other domains where correctness and reliability are particularly important.
Familiarity with property-based testing and other techniques for validating complex software behaviour.
Experience with Nix or reproducible development environments.
Experience working in an engineering consultancy or collaborating directly with client teams.

Responsibilities

Design, implement, test, and maintain reliable software using functional programming principles.
Develop clear, composable, and maintainable solutions to complex engineering problems.
Apply strong typing, domain modelling, and abstraction to improve software correctness and reliability.
Collaborate with engineers, technical leads, and client stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver effective solutions.
Contribute to system design and architecture, balancing correctness, simplicity, performance, and maintainability.
Write automated tests and use appropriate techniques to validate system behaviour.
Review code, share technical knowledge, and contribute to engineering standards.
Investigate and resolve complex technical issues across existing systems.
Communicate technical decisions clearly and explain trade-offs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Adapt to different client environments, codebases, and technical challenges.
Contribute to continuous improvement in engineering practices, tools, and delivery processes.