Sr. Backend Architect (Rust)

TechShack are working with a leading, profitable exchange backed by some of the most well-known players in the market. They’re rebuilding core infrastructure to support the next phase of scale: re-architecting core components for performance, reliability, and scale as they expand product coverage. The team is globally distributed and the role is fully remote.

This is a leadership seat for a Rust first architect who’s seen most of an exchange end-to-end and wants to own a true 2+ year rebuild programme. Expectation is you’ll set the bar for Rust across the org and help grow the team (1 to 4 hires over time).

Compensation: up to $350,000 base + bonus + equity

What you’ll work on

• Own the next-generation backend rebuild across the core trading stack: real-time trade flows, execution pipeline, risk/margin, positions, market data and streaming APIs.
• Architect high-throughput, latency-critical Rust services that stay stable under peak load with tight p99/p999 behaviour and low jitter.
• Design the engine room: pre-trade risk checks, margin logic, position lifecycle, liquidation paths, and guardrails/kill-switch controls.
• Partner across teams to define clean boundaries, failure modes, and rollout strategy as the platform evolves.
• Build foundations properly: HA, horizontal scaling, zero-downtime upgrades, safe rollouts, incident playbooks and post-mortems that lead to measurable improvements.
• Put observability everywhere: tracing/metrics/logging, SLOs, alerting, capacity signals and performance regression detection.
• Create simulation and replay harnesses to validate changes before production (load, failover, extreme market conditions).
• Be the Rust thought leader internally: set standards, coach engineers, and raise the quality bar across the platform.

What we’re looking for

• 3+ years minimum Rust in production, building performance-critical systems.
• 7+ years backend engineering experience overall.
• Ultra-low latency mindset: hot-path profiling, lock-free/low-lock concurrency, cache/memory layout, backpressure, and reducing jitter.
• Exchange experience across 70%+ of the core components, for example: matching/order book, execution/order routing, risk, margin, positions, market data/streaming, internal APIs and monitoring.
• Comfort owning the full loop: requirements → architecture → implementation → measurement → rollout → on-call/incident response.
• Able to explain what you changed, how you measured it, and the impact (latency, throughput, stability, trading outcomes).

Nice to have

• Derivatives experience (traditional or crypto), and familiarity with funding, liquidation flows, and margining models.
• Event-driven architectures (Kafka-style), Redis, distributed systems patterns, high-throughput data pipelines.
• Protocols/feeds: FIX, binary feeds, ITCH/OUCH, SBE/Aeron-style IPC, shared memory patterns.
• Systems optimisation: CPU pinning/affinity, NUMA, cache locality, IRQ/interrupt tuning, NIC tuning, kernel bypass/DPDK.
• Open-source contributions in Rust or trading infrastructure.

Why this role

• True exchange rebuild with a 2+ year runway and strong backing
• Top-of-market comp with real ownership via equity
• High-trust environment reporting into the CTO + CRO, with scope to set backend direction and build a team
• Ideal for HFT engineers who want to keep the performance edge without trading seat restrictions
• If you’re a senior Rust engineer/architect who’s built most of an exchange (order book to risk) and you want to lead a serious rebuild, apply here or message me and I’ll share details.