Reya Labs - Rust Engineer

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a crucial role in designing, developing and maintaining robust and scalable backend systems. Your role goes beyond writing code—you’ll architect systems that are resilient, secure, and optimized for low-latency, real-time processing. We’re a dynamic, forward-thinking, fully remote team with an ambitious roadmap and a relentless drive to make things happen.

The ideal candidate is someone who loves DeFi, web3, engineering, security, rigor and speed. If you’re a highly skilled Senior Backend engineer with over eight years of experience with a commitment to code quality and state-of-the-art software testing practices, we want to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Backend Development: Design, develop, and maintain the core backend systems that power the Reya DeX and Network. This includes writing clean, efficient, and maintainable code. The exchange backend will need to support a high-throughput order-book and index on-chain data into event queues and various persistence layers to be consumed by the UI and Risk Dashboards via scalable APIs and WebSockets.
• System Architecture: Define the high-level structure of the backend systems, the data flow, and interactions between the various components of the backend stack. Focus on messaging and event-driven architecture patterns common in financial services.
• Reliability, Performance & Availability: Ensure the architectural design addresses reliability and high availability and performance requirements. Implement failover mechanisms, redundancy, and disaster recovery plans to minimize downtime.
• Security: Implement and maintain robust security measures to protect backend systems and APIs from a variety of attack patterns including but not limited to DDoS attacks, data breaches, injection attacks.
• Data Storage Strategy: Define the strategy for data storage, including selection of databases and data models suitable for financial applications. Consider trade-offs between relational, key-value stores and messaging queues.
• Testing Strategy: Develop and execute a comprehensive testing strategy including unit, integration, security, load and performance testing. Collaborate with the development team to create and maintain detailed test reports and testing processes.
• Technological Evaluation: Stay updated on emerging technologies and trends in backend development and architecture. Evaluate the potential adoption of new tools, frameworks, and methodologies to enhance our systems’ performance and scalability.
• Documentation and Communication: Clearly document the architectural design, making it accessible to the development team and non-technical audience. Collaborate with software engineers to implement the design effectively and ensure that it aligns with the intended goals.
• Code Review: Participate in code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and enforce coding standards and best practices.
• Team Collaboration: Work closely with the cross-functional team, including on-chain and front end engineers as well as the heads of product management and quant, cto and ceo.
• 8+ years of experience as a Backend Engineer with experience working in financial services industry
• 6+ years of experience with Rust and/or C++ building highly scalable webservices
• Mastery of asynchronous programming and advanced concurrency patterns. Emphasis on thread safety and lock-free data structures.
• 6+ years of experience designing and maintaining relational databases like PosgreSQL
• 4+ years of experience with messaging and low latency persistence like Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ or others
• Experience in building and maintaining high-availability systems that have handled significant transaction volumes
• Strong verbal and written communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment
• Strong proficiency in securing and hardening backend systems and APIs against evolving security threats.
• Strong knowledge of software testing methodologies
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization tools (e.g Docker, Kubernetes)

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent experience
• Experience with low-level network programming, including asynchronous I/O, direct socket programming, and familiarity with Linux kernel optimizations (e.g., epoll, zero-copy, or even kernel bypass techniques where applicable)
• Experience in fine-tuning latency-sensitive components, particularly in trading systems like order matching engines and risk engines
• Familiarity with blockchain technology, smart contracts and decentralized systems
• Knowledge and understanding of fundamentals of finance, more specifically derivatives trading

You Should Apply If

• You are comfortable working with a small team that deals with complexity, unknowns, and ambiguity
• You are excited at the opportunity to help us grow and shape the future of finance
• You enjoy rapid prototyping and iterative development