Senior Backend Engineer - Hyperliquid Ecosystem

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join the Hyperliquid ecosystem, contributing to a rapidly growing team that develops infrastructure for cutting-edge decentralized financial markets. This role centers on managing critical backend components that support real-time trading platforms, comprehensive data pipelines, APIs, and databases designed to handle high volumes effectively.

You will be directly influencing products utilized by hundreds of thousands — scaling towards millions — of traders, addressing technical challenges related to latency, consistency, reliability, and overall performance in a dynamic environment.

This position involves significant ownership and influence over architectural decisions and offers the exciting opportunity to build products from conception to delivery (0 to 1). The role encourages collaboration with frontend and mobile engineers and demands a commitment to technical excellence and product quality.

Note: This is a fully remote role available to candidates located in Europe or the USA, requiring overlapping working hours with EST.

Key Responsibilities

• Take ownership of backend system architecture and critical technology decisions to ensure scalability, reliability, and high performance.
• Build and manage real-time data pipelines handling order books, trades, and market events efficiently.
• Design, develop, and maintain backend API services including GraphQL and WebSockets supporting both web and mobile clients.
• Work extensively with databases and technologies such as PostgreSQL, Redis, and ClickHouse to support large-scale trading data.
• Optimize database queries, caching mechanisms, schema design, and access patterns to manage growth in data volume and usage.
• Implement comprehensive metrics, monitoring systems, and alerting mechanisms; participate actively in on-call rotations to ensure reliability.
• Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks related to latency, memory usage, and system reliability under heavy production loads.
• Collaborate closely with frontend and mobile teams to deliver real-time and analytical data through robust APIs.
• Contribute in a fast-paced startup-like environment, maintaining meaningful ownership over the products and systems being developed.

Requirements and Qualifications

• Minimum of 5 years of professional backend engineering experience with strong production exposure to TypeScript.
• Demonstrated expertise in designing and operating real-time systems using WebSockets, event streaming, pub/sub, or similar technologies.
• In-depth knowledge of PostgreSQL and Redis; experience with columnar databases like ClickHouse is highly desirable.
• Proven track record managing highly available services at significant scale.
• Strong grasp of trading concepts such as orders, fills, order books, positions, and executions.
• Experience architecting APIs optimized for latency-sensitive and high-throughput scenarios.
• Superior debugging and performance tuning capabilities, including working with slow queries, memory leaks, and production performance bottlenecks.
• Solid understanding of backend architecture, distributed systems, and integration patterns.
• Experience or familiarity with EVM-based blockchain systems, decentralized finance (DeFi), and on-chain data is a plus.
• Knowledge of Kafka or similar streaming technologies is advantageous.
• Background in building trading platforms, fintech applications, or other low-latency, performance-critical systems is beneficial.
• Excellent ownership mentality, communication skills, collaborative approach, and comfort with ambiguity in fast-changing environments.

Compensation and Benefits

• Annual salary ranging from $150,000 to $200,000 USD for a full-time permanent position, supplemented by equity and benefits.
• Remote-first working model permitting work from Europe or the USA.
• Financial support for remote office setup including laptop, peripherals, and workspace equipment.
• Opportunities to participate in global in-person team offsites and coworking sessions.
• Flexible vacation policy that encourages adequate rest and disconnection.
• Dedicated learning and professional development budget to foster continuous growth.
• Full-time, permanent contract with remote work flexibility.