Reya Labs - Rust Engineer in London

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will play a crucial role in designing, developing and maintaining robust and scalable backend systems. Your role goes beyond writing code—you'll architect systems that are resilient, secure, and optimized for low-latency, real-time processing. We're a dynamic, forward-thinking, fully remote team with an ambitious roadmap and a relentless drive to make things happen.

The ideal candidate is someone who loves DeFi, web3, engineering, security, rigor and speed. If you're a highly skilled Senior Backend engineer with over eight years of experience with a commitment to code quality and state-of-the-art software testing practices, we want to hear from you.

Responsibilities

• Backend Development: Design, develop, and maintain the core backend systems that power the Reya DeX and Network. This includes writing clean, efficient, and maintainable code.
• System Architecture: Define the high-level structure of the backend systems, the data flow, and interactions between the various components of the backend stack. Focus on messaging and event-driven architecture patterns common in financial services.
• Reliability, Performance & Availability: Ensure the architectural design addresses reliability and high availability and performance requirements. Implement failover mechanisms, redundancy, and disaster recovery plans to minimize downtime.
• Security: Implement and maintain robust security measures to protect backend systems and APIs from a variety of attack patterns including but not limited to DDoS attacks, data breaches, injection attacks.
• Data Storage Strategy: Define the strategy for data storage, including selection of databases and data models suitable for financial applications. Consider trade-offs between relational, key-value stores and messaging queues.
• Testing Strategy: Develop and execute a comprehensive testing strategy including unit, integration, security, load and performance testing. Collaborate with the development team to create and maintain detailed test reports and testing processes.
• Technological Evaluation: Stay updated on emerging technologies and trends in backend development and architecture. Evaluate the potential adoption of new tools, frameworks, and methodologies to enhance our systems' performance and scalability.
• Documentation and Communication: Clearly document the architectural design, making it accessible to the development team and non-technical audience. Collaborate with software engineers to implement the design effectively and ensure that it aligns with the intended goals.
• Code Review: Participate in code reviews, mentor junior engineers, and enforce coding standards and best practices.
• Team Collaboration: Work closely with the cross-functional team, including on-chain and front end engineers as well as the heads of product management and quant, CTO and CEO.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a Backend Engineer with experience working in financial services industry.
• 6+ years of experience with Rust and/or C++ building highly scalable web services.
• Mastery of asynchronous programming and advanced concurrency patterns. Emphasis on thread safety and lock-free data structures.
• 6+ years of experience designing and maintaining relational databases like PostgreSQL.
• 4+ years of experience with messaging and low latency persistence like Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ or others.
• Experience in building and maintaining high-availability systems that have handled significant transaction volumes.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills and the ability to work effectively in a collaborative team environment.
• Strong proficiency in securing and hardening backend systems and APIs against evolving security threats.
• Strong knowledge of software testing methodologies.
• Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and containerization tools (e.g Docker, Kubernetes).

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field or equivalent experience.
• Experience with low-level network programming, including asynchronous I/O, direct socket programming, and familiarity with Linux kernel optimizations (e.g., epoll, zero-copy, or even kernel bypass techniques where applicable).
• Experience in fine-tuning latency-sensitive components, particularly in trading systems like order matching engines and risk engines.
• Familiarity with blockchain technology, smart contracts and decentralized systems.
• Knowledge and understanding of fundamentals of finance, more specifically derivatives trading.

You Should Apply If You are comfortable working with a small team that deals with complexity, unknowns, and ambiguity. You are excited at the opportunity to help us grow and shape the future of finance. You enjoy rapid prototyping and iterative development.