Director of Engineering (Contract, LATAM)

Job description

About Nexus Nexus is the engine for verifiable finance — a blockchain designed to natively embed the world’s financial system into one compounding system. Built to support every major financial market on a single global exchange, Nexus unifies infrastructure that has historically been fragmented across chains and intermediaries. Headquartered in San Francisco with a growing presence in Buenos Aires, Nexus is proud to be a cross-continental team of engineers, cryptographers, and market builders. We’re investing deeply in the Latin American ecosystem — and always looking for world-class talent to join us. Nexus is backed by leading investors, including Pantera, Lightspeed, Dragonfly, Faction, Blockchain Builders Fund, Alliance, and SVA, and works with more than 100 partners across the global finance and blockchain stack. Location: Remote Type: Full-time THE ROLE You will own the engineering of the Nexus Exchange end-to-end — the matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing and storage, the API/CLI/SDK surfaces, the oracle, and the infrastructure that runs it all. This is a money-handling domain where correctness, throughput, and tail latency are non-negotiable, and where breadth across many subsystems is the job. You’ll set direction and stay hands-on in the highest-leverage code. This role anchors the Exchange Infrastructure specialization while carrying the full org-wide Head of Engineering mandate: own the architecture, lead the org, drive product and business outcomes, and make the team the most productive it can possibly be. We’re open to both experienced engineering leaders and rising leaders with outsized leadership ambition and the trajectory to back it. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Own architecture across the Exchange domain — and stay hands-on, writing production code in the highest-leverage parts of the system. - Build the full Exchange and all its sub-components: matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing, cold data storage, API / CLI / SDK, oracle, and the underlying infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform). - Lead the engineering org — senior engineers plus pods — managing timelines, roadmaps, and resourcing. - Drive product and customer outcomes, business-minded first; drive urgency and high-frequency iteration. - Make the org the most productive and efficient it can be. - Own end-to-end automation of engineering processes: agent infrastructure, logging, telemetry, observability — “closing the loop” with self-improvement loops and maximizing organizational context for agentic execution. - Design team structures and incentives with the CEO and exec team. - Manage an international, distributed workforce. - Drive quality infrastructure — telemetry, observability, and thorough automated testing (e2e, property, fuzz, invariants) — and set the bar for code review, on-call, and incident response, with particular rigor on money-handling paths. Correctness and performance should be continuously provable, not assumed. - Grow ICs and tech leads. - Communicate via design docs, RFCs, and post-mortems. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 8+ years building production software, including 2+ years in an engineering leadership capacity (tech lead / staff / principal / architect across multiple teams). Experience leading engineering orgs is important. - Proven high-throughput, low-latency systems experience and strong command of concurrent/parallel systems. - Deep hands-on stack fluency: Rust, Go, Next.js/TS or Node, GCP. - Architecture chops with sound correctness / latency / throughput / operability trade-offs. - Business-minded and outcome-driven. - Resilient and logical — clear-headed under pressure, reasons from first principles. - AI-forward: excited to use the latest AI tools and to push automation across the org. - Has mentored senior engineers and grown tech leads. - Fluent written and spoken English; async-first with meaningful US Pacific overlap (naturally strong for a U.S.-based hire). - Exchange-specific: deep exchange / trading-systems or comparable transaction-processing architecture; matching / risk / settlement correctness; market data (indexing, cold storage); API / SDK / CLI surfaces; oracle design. BONUS POINTS - Experience with exchanges / trading systems. - Standing up engineering practices (CI/CD, observability, on-call) in a fast-growing org. - Building automation / internal dev platforms / agentic workflow tooling. - Founding or early engineer at a high-velocity startup. - Open-source in Rust / Go / systems. OUR STACK - Backend & systems: Rust, Go. Web & product surfaces: Next.js / TypeScript. Infrastructure: Google Cloud (GCE/GCP), containerized services, modern CI/CD, Terraform/Pulumi, Prometheus/Grafana.