Senior Backend Engineer (Rust)
Abacus Group, LLC·Senior·On-site · San Francisco·$185k–$300k USD
Posted Oct 18, 2026·abacusgroup,llc.com
Our client is a well-funded crypto trading startup ($15M+ raised) building a unified trading platform that lets retail traders access perpetuals, cross-chain spot, and prediction markets across multiple venues from a single portfolio-margined account. The founding team previously built the market-leading order execution platform for crypto retail traders (90%+ market share, $900B+ in lifetime volume) and ran one of the top on-chain and centralized exchange HFT firms in the industry. The team is 10 people, deeply technical, and works in person in San Francisco.
They're hiring a Backend Engineer to build the core infrastructure behind their real-time trading platform. This is a high-ownership seat on a small team where your systems will directly move and protect user capital.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain the risk and liquidation engines that manage exposure and improve capital efficiency in volatile markets.
- Design the blockchain state machines that power trading, settlement, and risk operations.
- Develop services that keep state consistent across asynchronous processes using voting, consensus, and coordination mechanisms.
- Process live market data while coordinating actions across trading venues over WebSocket streams.
- Build high-performance REST and WebSocket APIs with millisecond-level response times.
What they're looking for
- Strong backend experience in Rust, C++, or Go, with production Rust experience a plus (engineers coming from C++ or Go should have genuine interest in moving to Rust, since it's the core of the stack).
- Strong command of asynchronous programming, solid distributed systems fundamentals, and a performance-driven mindset.
- Experience with blockchain or on-chain systems, trading infrastructure, risk systems, or market data pipelines is highly valued.
- Thrives in a high-bandwidth, collaborative, in-person environment.
Tech stack
Rust, Tokio, distributed systems, blockchain, REST and WebSocket APIs, Docker