Principal Engineer, AI Products

Company Overview

Paradex is recognized as a leading startup employer in Singapore, ranked 12th by TECHINASIA Awards 2026. It serves as more than just a decentralized exchange—it's a comprehensive financial platform integrating Exchange, Asset Management, and Borrow/Lend services. Users benefit from seamless access to over 250 markets with zero fees, superior liquidity compared to centralized exchanges, and institutional-grade privacy, all operating on a high-speed blockchain.

Backed by top-tier investors and incubated by Paradigm, Paradex is rapidly expanding its team of passionate engineers. The company culture is direct and no-nonsense, operating without product managers, managers, or 1:1 meetings. Team members work closely with the CEO and a small elite group to push the boundaries of performance and user experience in decentralized finance.

About the Role

As a Principal Engineer on the product engineering team, you will guide the architecture and technical direction of Paradex's AI-related products, including the Dime Terminal. Collaborating closely with security, product, and engineering teams, you will tackle complex challenges at the intersection of AI infrastructure and finance, particularly addressing areas where AI models, untrusted application code, and real financial assets converge.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and develop a scalable platform that enables users and AI agents to coordinate activities across various platforms and applications.
• Create and optimize custom large language models tailored for financial applications, balancing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Lead the security architecture to safely empower users to leverage AI, ensuring protection of sensitive keys and secrets.
• Provide ongoing technical leadership by exploring and integrating emerging technologies to evolve the AI ecosystem over time.

Required Qualifications

• Over 10 years of experience in backend and distributed systems engineering, including ownership of system architecture from conception through to scalable production deployment, ideally at a technical lead or principal engineer level.
• Practical experience developing or managing AI agent infrastructures, encompassing orchestration of tools, sandboxed executions, and defenses against model-level threats like prompt injections; familiarity with agent orchestration frameworks is beneficial.
• Extensive knowledge in security and identity architecture, particularly in secrets management and workload identity systems, with proven ability to design resilient systems that defend against compromised or malicious participants.
• Strong understanding of cryptocurrency technologies including blockchain, proof of work/stake, and layer 1 and layer 2 networks.
• Experience building finance-related infrastructure where accuracy and correctness are critical, such as ledgers, balance enforcement, and idempotent transactions, preferably within regulated or crypto-adjacent domains.
• Demonstrated success in providing technical leadership across teams to set direction and align on complex, ambiguous high-impact problems without detailed upfront specifications.

Benefits and Culture

• Industry-leading competitive compensation packages.
• Unlimited paid time off to support work-life balance.
• Comprehensive benefits customized per country.
• A work environment free of micromanagement, with no managers, 1:1 meetings, or unnecessary meetings.