Senior Backend Engineer

About Pluto

Pluto (YC W25) is building the financial infrastructure for superintelligence. Compute is the bottleneck of the AI economy, but it is extremely opaque, volatile, and difficult to finance. Pluto is the first exchange with a materially complete designation from the CFTC to make compute a liquid, tradable asset class.

We’re starting by building the exchange and clearing infrastructure for compute derivatives and enabling a new class of financial products on top of AI infrastructure.

This is a chance to build the defining financial asset class of AI from the ground-up.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems powering a regulated exchange and its surrounding infrastructure
• Own services end-to-end: architecture, implementation, deployment, and production reliability
• Work directly with founders and early customers to translate ambiguous requirements into robust systems
• Build for correctness, performance, and auditability in a high-stakes financial environment
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, system design discussions, and hands-on collaboration
• Contribute to core technical decisions across the stack and shape the long-term architecture

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of experience building and operating backend systems in production
• Strong systems design skills (distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, reliability)
• Experience owning services end-to-end in a production environment
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate other engineers
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous startup environment
• Strong communication skills (written and verbal)
• Willingness to work in-office 5 days/week

Preferred

• Experience with financial systems, trading infrastructure, or other high-integrity systems
• Familiarity with low-latency systems, event-driven architectures, or real-time data pipelines
• Prior startup experience (0→1 or early-stage scaling)
• Experience working with AWS and modern cloud infrastructure
• Interest in markets, infrastructure, or building new asset classes

What We’re Looking For

• Engineers who take ownership and ship end-to-end, not just write code
• Strong product intuition—you care about what gets built, not just how
• High bar for correctness and reliability
• People who want to work closely with users and shape a new market

Compensation

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Early team—outsized impact and ownership