Software Engineer - Database

About Payward and Bitnomial

Payward, the parent company behind Kraken and several other financial platforms, has developed a cutting-edge global financial infrastructure over 15 years aimed at promoting an open financial system worldwide. Bitnomial, a division of Payward, is launching a US-based derivatives exchange focusing initially on digital assets and planning to expand to commodities. It operates as a US CFTC regulated exchange, clearinghouse, and brokerage, offering crypto-settled derivatives like futures and options to diverse clients including brokers, hedge funds, and trading institutions globally.

Role Overview

In this position, you will work primarily with Haskell to develop systems that track every order, fill, and settlement in a highly regulated environment. Your tasks involve building, testing, and delivering robust features across multiple financial systems, designing database schemas and queries, and maintaining data integrity.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and deliver well-designed Haskell features and bug fixes across exchange, clearinghouse, and brokerage systems.
• Gain comprehensive understanding of order, trade, clearing, and settlement workflows.
• Create database schemas with precise numeric types and audit trails to ensure financial data accuracy.
• Implement safe and reversible migrations for large databases, and review peer migrations.
• Analyze and optimize query performance based on execution plans and production metrics.
• Manage system monitoring, respond to operational alerts, and assist with daily processes like settlement cycles.
• Diagnose and rectify production problems while documenting lessons learned.

Required Qualifications

• At least 3 years of professional experience in software engineering using functional or strongly-typed languages such as Haskell, Rust, or C++.
• Proficient with SQL and PostgreSQL, including transaction management and isolation levels.
• Strong foundation in computer science concepts like data structures, concurrency, distributed systems (replication, consistency, retries, idempotency), and maintaining data correctness across services.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotations and operational support duties.
• Precision and care when handling code and data involving financial transactions, with an emphasis on measurement before tuning.
• Judicious use of AI tools to enhance productivity, with thorough validation of their output before deployment.
• Inquisitive mindset that questions proposed changes prior to implementation.
• Ability to stay calm and methodical under pressure during live production incidents.
• Effective collaboration with engineering, operations, risk, and compliance teams, with strong documentation habits.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background or experience in financial markets, trading, or financial services sectors.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related discipline, or equivalent hands-on experience.
• Prior experience with Haskell services integrated with PostgreSQL databases.
• Knowledge of AWS Aurora PostgreSQL production environments.
• Handling of large-scale time series or market data such as tick data or order book streams.
• Experience using declarative schema management tools like Atlas.

Additional Information

The company accepts applications continuously unless a deadline is specified. Applicants can choose to omit personally identifiable details from resumes for privacy reasons. The employer complies with fair hiring practices including consideration of candidates with criminal histories, consistent with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. Diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring are strongly emphasized. Candidates may be required to complete relevant skills or work-style assessments during the hiring process. The compensation range is approximately $96,000 to $192,000 annually.