Backend Engineer

How Markets Should Be

Traditional financial markets are broken. We are fixing them.

QFEX is the first perpetual futures exchange to allow 24/7, high leverage on traditional financial assets. 

Our vision: this kind of exchange will replace the entire $100bn TradFi exchange, clearing and brokerage industry

Our mission: make QFEX that exchange.

We were founded by Cambridge Maths duo Annanay Kapila and Joshua Wharton, who previously worked at Tower Research Capital and Citadel, respectively. The team also includes former staff from Jump, Barclays, and more.

QFEX raised $10m from a group of investors including General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners and Paul Graham.

What You’ll Do

Reliability & performance
Design fault-tolerant, low-latency, always-available services; write load tests and chaos suites; tune until p99 is boring.

Testing
Set up and carry out automated test suites including CI/CD and minimize technical debt.

Technical direction
Evaluate tools, set coding standards, and guide architectural decisions as we scale.

Culture & hiring
Share and receive new knowledge and experiences, set impeccable cultural standards, and help interview the next engineers.

What You’ll Need

• A STEM degree from a University that is highly ranked in your home country (at the level of Oxbridge/ Imperial in the UK, HYMPS in the US, or a top IIT in India).
• Experience with a high-performance language like Rust, C or C++.
• 3+ years building and working on real-time production Exchanges or HFT Systems.
• The desire to create and impose a responsible culture of tests, metrics, and graceful degradation.
• Impeccable levels of trust in yourself and others, including the ability to make decisions in minutes, not days.

Bonus points

• Fintech, exchange, or low-latency experience.
• Experience with a Python and common data science libraries like pandas and numpy.
• Deep Kubernetes or infrastructure-as-code experience.

Benefits

• Lunch allowance and regular company events.
• The ability to grow alongside some of the best minds in fintech, as well as set standards and culture.
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays.

Interview Process

1. 2x Founder call (30 min) – learn about our vision, share your story.
2. On-site deep dive (2-3 hours) – verbal questions and pair programming, meet the team.
3. Offer – we decide fast (usually within 24 h).