Senior Backend Engineer (Trading Infrastructure)

About the company

Hi, we're Ondo Finance. Our mission is to provide institutional-grade, blockchain-enabled investment products and services. We have both a technology arm that develops decentralized finance technology, and an asset management arm that creates and manages tokenized funds. We were the first company to tokenize exposure to US Treasuries, and have since expanded into several other assets. We are also focused on incubating protocols that can support both tokenized real-world assets and traditional crypto.

Founded by folks from Goldman Sachs Digital Assets Team, we’re backed by some of the best investors in the world including Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, Pantera Capital, Tiger Global, and more. We are currently the leaders in the space in terms of AUM and are well capitalized to continue growing the firm. We're fully remote, with team members across the U.S.

About the role

Ondo is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to build and maintain the foundational infrastructure behind our real-time trading systems. You will work on the messaging, sequencing, APIs, and market data pipelines that support trading, market making, and hedging.

This role centers on high-performance distributed systems engineering: designing low-latency messaging infrastructure using Aeron, building and evolving API layers such as FIX, WebSocket, and REST, and developing the sequencer and recovery mechanisms at the heart of the platform. You will solve deeply technical problems at the intersection of distributed systems, financial protocols, and infrastructure reliability.

This is an opportunity to shape core trading infrastructure, make consequential architecture decisions, and own systems from initial design through production operation. Correctness, latency, and recoverability matter as much as throughput.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance platform services, including API gateways and the core libraries that trading services build on.
• Build and evolve Aeron-based messaging infrastructure for reliable, low-latency communication.
• Tackle distributed systems problems end to end: ordering and determinism guarantees, zero-downtime deployments, multi-region architectures, and crash-consistent recovery.
• Develop sequencing, persistence, and replay infrastructure that allows services to recover reliably and reproduce trading state.
• Work across engineering teams to meet the throughput and latency requirements of real-time trading workflows, including market data distribution at scale.
• Provide reusable service infrastructure for scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient trading systems.
• Own production reliability, including diagnosing failures, investigating latency spikes, and improving observability and operational tooling.

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with deep proficiency in Rust, Go, C++, Java, or similar systems languages.
• Demonstrated ownership of large-scale distributed systems, from initial design through deployment, scaling, and long-term operations.
• Strong systems fundamentals: concurrency primitives, memory layout, I/O models, database design, network protocols, and the performance implications of each.
• Experience designing systems with stringent ordering, consistency, and durability guarantees, including their behavior during failures and recovery.
• Ability to own projects end to end: define the problem, design the solution, implement it, and see the rollout through to completion.
• A track record of leading technical decisions: navigating ambiguity, defining architecture, making meaningful trade-offs, and bringing a team along on the reasoning.
• Comfort working at multiple levels of abstraction, from API contract design to diagnosing latency spikes at the socket or disk layer.

Nice to haves

• Experience with Aeron or comparable low-latency messaging frameworks, such as Chronicle, LMAX Disruptor, or ZeroMQ.
• Experience with sequencer design, write-ahead logging, event sourcing, or custom persistence engines.
• Hands-on experience building geo-distributed or multi-site systems with active-active replication and regional failover.
• Familiarity with FIX protocol (4.x/5.x), SBE, or other structured financial messaging formats.
• Background in trading infrastructure, market data systems, exchange connectivity, or other latency-sensitive financial platforms.
• Production experience with Rust and Go

What we offer

• Competitive compensation including salary, future token rights, and/or equity (according to your preferences) — we're well-funded and believe that great talent deserves great compensation

• Full benefits (medical, vision, and dental) and flexible vacation policy (PTO)

• Small remote-first team across many countries — you'll be an early team member helping shape our vision, culture, and design practices

• A+ colleagues — our team includes alumni from: Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, Two Sigma, Bridgewater, SpaceX, AWS, Meta, Google, Pinterest, McKinsey, Circle, Uniswap, Phantom

• Best-in-class investors — we are proud to be backed by leading crypto experts and VCs, including Pantera Capital, Founders Fund and Coinbase Ventures