Founding Backend / Infrastructure Engineer

Job description

### **About the Company & Mission** We are an early-stage (Seed), venture-backed cross-border neobank and retail brokerage built for global investors. Our mission is to bridge financial borders across the Pacific: building a single platform where US investors can directly access, trade, and hold high-growth Asian equities (such as Korean and Japanese markets) as seamlessly as trading domestic US stocks. By combining an AI-native back end, real-time translated market research/filings, automated FX, multi-currency custody, and compliant clearing/settlement rails, we are removing the friction from international investing. Starting with a focus on cross-border retail brokerage, our long-term vision spans multi-currency banking, stablecoin-enabled instant cross-border settlement, and direct global market access on a single shelf. We run on absolute trust: moving real capital across international borders requires rock-solid, auditable, and resilient infrastructure. We are actively expanding our founding engineering team to build out core systems on our path toward full brokerage self-clearing operations. ### **Why This Role Exists** As a modern retail brokerage, our backend *is* the core product. You will carry three of the company’s most critical technical deliverables: 1. **Build the financial foundation:** Own the services driving order lifecycles, internal ledgers, multi-currency funding flows, and automated reconciliation from day one. 2. **Scale with precision:** Build high-throughput, fault-tolerant infrastructure capable of expanding from early users to hundreds of thousands of active investors without compromising auditability or data integrity. 3. **Set engineering standards:** Partner directly with the CTO to define company-wide standards for correctness, distributed system reliability, and production operational excellence. This is a founding-stage seat offering deep technical ownership and high agency over architecture, product decisions, and system design. ### What You Will Own - **Core Financial Engine:** Design, implement, and maintain end-to-end order routing, execution lifecycles, internal double-entry ledgers, and automated funding/reconciliation systems. - **Resilient Architecture:** Build production systems optimized for concurrency and partial network failures using idempotent handlers, durable event history, replayable state, and self-healing mechanisms. - **Third-Party & Banking Integrations:** Integrate directly with partner clearing broker-dealers, international brokers, banking rails (ACH, wires), FX mechanisms, and automated KYC/AML verification providers. - **Production Excellence:** Take end-to-end operational ownership—including sandbox testing environments, monitoring/alerting, incident response, on-call rotations, and postmortems. - **Internal Operational Tooling:** Build robust internal tools and dashboards for operations, compliance, and support teams to audit, investigate, and resolve issues proactively. - **Data & AI Infrastructure Support:** Support underlying data pipelines powering our real-time AI research and content-translation engines (no dedicated ML background required). ### ### Who We Are Looking For **Must-Have:** - **Experience:** 6+ years of hands-on experience building, scaling, and maintaining high-availability production backend systems. - **Financial Data Rigor:** Proven track record of owning mission-critical systems handling sensitive transactions (e.g., money movement, balances, orders, ledgering, or high-integrity financial data). - **Technical Proficiency:** Deep expertise in a modern backend language (e.g., Go, Python, Node.js, Rust, or Java) and production data infrastructure (relational DBs, distributed event queues/streams, caching layers). - **System Design & Correctness:** Strong instincts for distributed systems trade-offs—data modeling, transaction isolation, idempotency, failure domain isolation, and state reconciliation. - **Production Maturity:** Hands-on experience with on-call rotations, incident management, performance tuning, and writing thorough postmortems. - **Startup Mindset:** High comfort navigating ambiguity, making pragmatic engineering trade-offs, and contributing to both product strategy and technical architecture. **Strong Nice-to-Have:** - Experience scaling consumer fintech, crypto, or brokerage platforms to 100k+ active users. - Domain knowledge in capital markets (Order Management Systems/OMS, market data, tax-lot accounting, corporate actions, post-trade settlement). - Experience integrating with partner broker-dealers, clearing platforms, or Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) APIs. - Hands-on experience with double-entry accounting ledgers, multi-currency FX rails, or stablecoin/on-chain settlement. - Cross-border regulatory awareness or language fluency relevant to East Asian markets (e.g., Korean or Japanese). - Familiarity with AI-assisted developer tools and workflows that accelerate shipping velocity without compromising correctness. ### ### Who Is NOT the Right Fit - Engineers who prefer taking pre-written tickets rather than driving problem definition, system design, and execution from zero. - Engineers who view data correctness, logging, observability, and auditability as secondary considerations. - Engineers seeking a purely advisory role without willingness to carry operational and production on-call responsibilities.