Head 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 (LATAM) Type: Contract THE ROLE We are looking for a Head of Engineering to own the technical architecture across Nexus’s product surface and ensure the code shipped by our engineering pods is coherent, performant, and built to last. You’ll set the bar for how we design systems, write code, and review each other’s work — and you’ll do it with your hands on the keyboard, not just on a whiteboard. You’ll partner closely with engineering management to grow pod maturity, raise the level of technical decision-making across the team, and turn architectural intent into shipped product. This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad influence — ideal for someone who has been a staff/principal engineer or hands-on tech lead and wants the autonomy and leverage of a small, ambitious team. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Own the architecture. Define and evolve the technical architecture spanning our Rust services, Go infrastructure, and Next.js/TypeScript surfaces on GCP — and make sure what gets built actually matches it. - Stay hands-on. Write production code in the highest-leverage parts of the stack: critical services, shared libraries, complex integrations, and load-bearing changes that set patterns for the rest of the team. - Guide pods of engineers. Work across multiple pods to align on system boundaries, interfaces, data models, and non-functional requirements. Lead design reviews and unblock teams on hard technical decisions. - Raise the engineering bar. Shape how we do code review, testing, observability, on-call, and incident response. Drive the practices that make a team able to ship quickly and safely at scale. - Cultivate engineering maturity. Partner with engineering managers to grow ICs, mentor tech leads, calibrate seniority, and develop the next generation of architects on the team. - Translate strategy into systems. Work with product, research, and leadership to turn ambiguous goals into clear technical plans and sequenced execution paths. - Communicate clearly. Write crisp design docs, RFCs, and post-mortems. Make complex systems understandable to engineers, leadership, and partners. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - Experience. 8+ years building production software, including 2+ years in an engineering leadership capacity — tech lead, staff engineer, or architect responsible for system-level design across multiple teams. - Tech stack fluency. Deep, hands-on proficiency in our core stack that can be Rust, Go, Next.js / TypeScript or Node, and Google Cloud (GCE/GCP). You’ve shipped non-trivial production systems in these technologies, not just read about them. - High-throughput, low-latency systems. You’ve designed and operated production systems where throughput and tail latency are first-class constraints — think trading systems, real-time matching/order flow, high-frequency event pipelines, or comparable performance-critical infrastructure. - Architecture chops. Demonstrated track record designing distributed, performance-sensitive systems and making sound trade-offs around correctness, latency, throughput, and operability. - Engineering judgment. Strong instincts for code quality, testing strategy, and sustainable abstractions. You know when to invest, when to ship, and when to pay down debt. - Leadership without authority. You influence through clear thinking, written artifacts, and credible code — not titles. You’ve mentored senior engineers and helped grow tech leads. - Communication. Fluent written and spoken English. You can run a design review with senior engineers and explain a system to a non-technical stakeholder in the same day. - Remote-readiness. Based in Latin America, comfortable working asynchronously, and able to maintain meaningful overlap with US Pacific working hours. - AI-native. Embrace AI as a core part of how you work, think, and build. BONUS POINTS - Open-source contributions in Rust, Go, or the broader systems ecosystem. - Experience with Web3 exchanges - Experience standing up engineering practices (CI/CD, observability, on-call) inside a fast-growing org. - Prior work as a founding or early engineer at a high-velocity startup. - Prior experience managing or otherwise leading high-performing teams OUR STACK - Backend & systems: Rust, Go - Web & product surfaces: Next.js, TypeScript - Infrastructure: Google Cloud (GCE/GCP), containerized services, modern CI/CD