Software Engineer Backend

About the role - Must have AUSTRALIAN WORKING RIGHTS

You'll join a backend team of engineers, designing, building, and operating the services and APIs behind the platform — HTTP APIs, websockets, and Kafka-driven background workers, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis/Valkey. The platform runs three trading modes that must never bleed into each other: Paper trading (simulated positions marked against live market prices, including stop-loss/take-profit and liquidation), Live trading (real funds on a non-custodial perpetuals DEX; trade records are append-only, with no edits or deletes), and Copy trading (fanning out a trader's executions to followers, with per-follower balances, P&L, and trader payouts).

Key responsibilities

• Design, implement, and operate backend APIs and background workers across social and trading services

• Produce and consume Kafka events, with retries and idempotency done properly

• Write and review PostgreSQL queries, and own the data model for the services you run

• Maintain strict separation of balances, P&L, and payouts across the three trading modes

• Review pull requests, debug production issues, and ship changes that are safe at scale

• Collaborate with backend, mobile, and product engineers on API contracts

• Share an on-call rotation with other engineers

About you

• 4+ years building backend services in production

• Production experience with TypeScript/Node.js and/or Python

• Strong SQL and PostgreSQL experience

• Experience with event-driven systems (message queues or streaming, e.g. Kafka)

• Experience designing and operating HTTP APIs

• Comfort owning a service in production: debugging, deployments, on-call

• Ability to read existing code and extend it without introducing a parallel pattern

About us

Our client runs a social investing platform, currently focused on crypto: users build portfolios and positions, share them publicly, and earn based on performance. They've been operating profitably for five years and are closing a Series A with institutional investors. The team is distributed across the US and Australia.