Senior Rust Backend Engineer – Distributed Systems

Travoom • Austin, TX

4h • Onsite

About The Position

OleOle is building a global, real-time social and messaging platform for sports fans from the ground up, natively in Rust. This is a senior backend engineering role focused on foundational architectural decisions and system design, not a task-driven or feature implementation role. The engineer will design and evolve the backend architecture powering public conversations, real-time messaging, video, commerce, and token-based incentives for millions of users worldwide. The company is a startup aiming to reshape how sports communities engage digitally, with a mission to disrupt the global sports ecosystem by empowering fans, clubs, and brands to connect, transact, and create without middlemen. The platform is being built using Rust, WebAssembly, and a blockchain-compatible architecture, with a focus on a free social network and messaging platform for football fans, incorporating gambling, e-commerce, crypto, and NFT marketplaces.

Requirements

• 7–12+ years of professional backend engineering experience
• Proven ownership of backend systems in production
• Strong, real-world Rust experience (async systems, not experiments)
• Deep understanding of PostgreSQL data modeling and performance
• Experience designing APIs and explaining tradeoffs clearly
• Experience building or evolving systems that had to scale
• Ability to reason about architecture without hiding behind buzzwords
• If you’ve never been responsible for a system’s long-term health, this is not the role.
• 7-12 years of software engineering experience (preferably at early-stage startups or high-growth platforms)
• 4+ years of experience working in Rust in production environments, ideally on scalable web or blockchain-native backends
• Strong experience designing modern, scalable backend architectures from scratch — including authentication, real-time messaging, microservices, APIs, caching, and database design
• Proficiency with Rust frameworks like Actix, Axum, Tokio, or Rocket
• Comfortable working without product managers, defining scope, and leading engineering direction
• Solutions not problems.
• Creative problem solver who can courageously propose and support new ideas to our organization.
• Ability to adapt. An ideal candidate will welcome the opportunity to solve a broad range of problems using a wide array of technologies.
• Comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities and general growing pains of an early-stage technology company
• An exceptional entrepreneurial judgment that fosters independence over micro-management

Nice To Haves

• Experience with real-time systems (feeds, messaging, streaming)
• Experience with high-write or high-fanout workloads
• ETL / data pipelines
• Media or video delivery systems
• Token, wallet, or crypto-adjacent systems (non-blockchain core)
• Experience with WebAssembly, gRPC, or GraphQL is a plus
• Passion for decentralization, crypto, Web3, and building products that empower users
• Bonus: experience with blockchain integration, tokenomics, or building in no-fee marketplaces
• Understanding of football and international sports a huge plus

Responsibilities

• Designing and owning core backend architecture in Rust (async-first)
• Defining service boundaries, data ownership, and evolution strategy
• Designing scalable APIs (REST and/or GraphQL) for mobile and web clients
• Modeling and operating PostgreSQL as a long-term source of truth
• Architecting real-time systems (feeds, messaging, event-driven workflows)
• Making tradeoffs around consistency, latency, and scalability
• Working with DevOps while retaining backend architectural authority
• Reviewing critical code paths and preventing premature complexity
• Helping shape the backend team as the company grows
• Designing and owning the development of our short-form video system—a TikTok-like feature built natively into the platform—covering the full pipeline from video upload and processing to delivery, feed ranking, and real-time engagement.
• Leading the build-out of our football history data engine, a large-scale structured content system designed for SEO, powering millions of pages across teams, players, and competitions.
• Designing data models, ingestion pipelines, and server-side rendering strategies to generate fast, search-optimized pages at scale.

Benefits

• Founding engineer-level equity and token allocation
• Deferred salary until funding is secured
• Long-term ownership and technical leadership
• A mission-driven, elite team with deep experience in sports, media, crypto, and startups
• Maximum influence and upside as one of the first engineers.

What This Job Offers

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