Senior Backend Engineer/Staff Engineer

ProphetX • New York, NY

1d • $165,000 - $210,000 • Remote

About The Position

We’re looking for a Staff Backend Engineer (IC4) to set technical direction across multiple teams and own the organization’s most complex, high-impact systems. The role solves ambiguous problems at the platform level, shapes architecture for exchange and trading infrastructure, and raises the engineering bar across the organization. The engineer will own complex systems behind the exchange, influence roadmap and architecture, and help scale low-latency, compliant systems on a live, regulated platform.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of backend experience, with deep expertise in Go, Java, C++, or Python; Go is strongly preferred.
• Proven track record designing and operating highly scalable, low-latency, real-time distributed systems in production.
• Deep expertise in microservices, event-driven architecture (Kafka), and RESTful and WebSocket API design.
• Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL data modeling and performance tuning.
• Extensive experience with AWS or equivalent, Docker and Kubernetes, and CI/CD at scale.
• Experience with observability and incident management for production systems.
• Demonstrated cross-team leadership and the ability to explain complex tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong communication skills, including explaining complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proactive, growth-focused, highly adaptable, and a strong sense of ownership.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in trading, exchange, fintech, or other high-throughput transactional systems is strongly preferred.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for critical systems spanning multiple teams.
• Lead cross-team initiatives from design through delivery, aligning engineering, product, and compliance stakeholders.
• Own the reliability, latency, and scalability of core exchange systems; lead incident response and postmortems for major issues.
• Make and document key architectural decisions, balancing innovation, risk, and regulatory requirements.
• Break ambiguous, organization-level problems into workstreams and delegate effectively to senior and junior engineers.
• Partner with product and leadership to influence roadmap and prioritization with technical insight.
• Seek development opportunities and share knowledge with peers and junior engineers.

Benefits

• Equity opportunities.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Flexible time off.
• Remote work within the U.S.
• Flexible work arrangements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed