Founding Backend Engineer

QFEX; England; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading fintech company is looking for a Founding Backend Engineer to design and implement highly available systems that will process significant trading volumes. Join an elite team to establish technical direction, cultural standards, and engineer crucial systems, located near Liverpool Street in London.

Benefits

Lunch allowance

Regular company events

Brand-new office with top-tier hardware

25 days holiday + bank holidays

Qualifications

• 3+ years in high-traffic/real-time systems.
• Experience in Go, C, or C++.
• UK work authorization required.

Responsibilities

• Design fault-tolerant, low-latency services.
• Set up CI/CD, IaC, monitoring tools.
• Guide architectural decisions and cultural standards.

Skills

High-performance languages

DevOps

Systems design

Culture of tests

Education

STEM degree from a highly ranked university

Tools

Kubernetes

Infrastructure-as-Code

Job description

Founding Backend Engineer

Mission

QFEX is building a team of founding engineers who can design, code and own systems that will soon process billions of dollars in trading volume every single day. This is an incredible opportunity to work alongside an elite, well-funded team of builders from some of the biggest financial companies in the world (Citadel and Tower Research Capital) and change the course of financial history.

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.

Developer experience
Set up and maintain CI/CD, IaC, monitoring, and on-call processes that future teammates will thank you for.

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.
• Experience with a high-performance language like Go, C or C++.
• 3+ years building and running high-traffic or real-time production systems (including DevOps experience).
• 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.
• UK work authorisation and willingness to work Monday–Friday from our office next to Liverpool Street Station.

Bonus points

• Fintech, exchange, or low-latency experience.
• Experience in Rust or similar language.
• Deep Kubernetes or infrastructure-as-code experience.
• Cyber security and compliance know-how.

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.
• Brand-new office near Liverpool Street with top-tier hardware and a stocked kitchen.
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays.