Backend Systems Engineer

We are a stealth-mode firm working on market and transaction-level systems. The work is not consumer-facing, and most of it is not public. We operate with a high bar for correctness, discretion, and long-horizon thinking.

Role Description

You will work on the design and evolution of backend systems that govern state, coordination, and system behavior across internal services.

The role focuses on how backend components interact under load, partial failure, and changing assumptions. Rather than building features or data pipelines, the work centers on defining system boundaries, managing state transitions, and ensuring that system behavior remains explicit and controlled as complexity grows.

Emphasis is placed on understanding emergent behavior: how small design decisions propagate through the system, how failures surface or remain hidden, and how correctness is preserved when components operate asynchronously or under degraded conditions.

The objective is to build backend systems that fail clearly, recover predictably, and remain legible to those who depend on them.

Responsibilities

• System Architecture: Design backend system structures with explicit boundaries, responsibilities, and interaction patterns.
• State & Coordination: Reason about state management, concurrency, and coordination across backend components.
• Failure Semantics: Define and enforce clear failure modes, recovery paths, and degradation behavior.
• Operational Robustness: Identify sources of systemic fragility and mitigate risks related to cascading failure or hidden coupling.
• Documentation: Produce precise internal documentation describing system behavior, invariants, and operational assumptions.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• Systems Experience: Experience working on backend systems where correctness, reliability, and state management are central concerns.
• Systems Thinking: Strong understanding of concurrency, distributed system behavior, and failure modes.
• Analytical Judgment: Ability to reason about system behavior beyond happy-path execution.
• Experience: Experience with distributed systems, coordination mechanisms, or low-level backend infrastructure is a plus.