Staff Engineer – Variational

About Us

We are building the foundational infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized derivatives. We provide a peer-to-peer protocol for the seamless trading, clearing, and settlement of perpetuals.

We have already facilitated hundreds of billions in trading volume, achieving undisputed product-market fit. We are currently the category leader in growth, outpacing the market in both volume growth and technical shipping velocity. We recently closed a $50M+ round backed by leading firms including Bain Capital Crypto, Peak XV (Sequoia), Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly, and Hack VC.

We are a lean, high-output team of ~15 (predominantly engineers) from top trading firms and tech companies. As we prepare to double our headcount over the next two quarters, we are looking for foundational hires who thrive in high-throughput, low-latency environments where the stakes are measured in billions.

This is a core backend engineering role with high ownership. Engineers are fully self-directed and will own critical, high-throughput systems processing billions in daily volume, including distributed architecture, real-time message processing, database design, and production infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Designing and building backend systems for high-frequency trading, derivatives settlement infrastructure, and client-facing fullstack applications
• Architecting distributed systems (consistency protocols, multi-service communication, asynchronous queues, real-time processing)
• Owning database design and optimization across relational, time-series, flat-file, and OLAP systems
• Building and maintaining production infrastructure (CI/CD, containerized deployments, monitoring, tracing, alerting)
• Implementing backend security (JWT authentication, WAF configuration, least-privilege systems)
• Managing infrastructure as code using Terraform

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend development experience in trading platforms, distributed systems, or similar domains
• Strong experience in Rust (preferred), C++, or similar systems languages
• Go/Java acceptable only with deep distributed systems background (not dev tooling focused)
• Strong expertise in distributed systems and database design
• Experience with production infrastructure:
  • Docker / Kubernetes
  • Terraform or AWS CDK
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Monitoring and alerting systems
• Solid software engineering background (L5+ minimum, L6 strongly preferred) with ownership of high-impact systems

Bonus

• Experience with trading platforms, dashboards, or DeFi
• Knowledge of market making, HFT, or similar domains
• Rust proficiency (if coming from C++/Go)
• Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis/Memcached
• Crypto/Web3 experience (nice to have, not required)