Senior Rust Backend Engineer

Astar Foundation; Singapore; On-site; SGD 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial technology firm in Singapore is seeking a Senior Rust Backend Engineer to build high-performance trading APIs. The role requires strong Rust skills, expertise in concurrent programming, and an understanding of trading systems. This position offers the opportunity to shape trading backend architecture, working in a distributed team on cutting-edge financial infrastructure.

Benefits

Competitive compensation

Growth opportunities

Work with a world-class engineering team

Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional Rust experience in production systems.
• Strong experience with the Tokio async runtime.
• Solid understanding of CEX/DEX systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance trading APIs.
• Implement structured concurrency using the Tokio runtime.
• Develop and maintain real-time state ingestion pipelines.

Skills

Rust expertise

Concurrent programming patterns

HTTP and WebSocket frameworks

Trading systems knowledge

Real-time data streaming

Tools

Tokio

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Docker

Job description

About Us

In partnership with one of the largest financial conglomerates, we aim to bring the majority of Japanese equities on-chain, creating a secure, transparent, and high-performance trading infrastructure that can support institutional volumes while remaining accessible to retail participants. We are building a next-generation decentralized exchange with a fully on-chain order book. Our system is built with a custom state transition function and consensus layer, purpose-designed for high-performance, low-latency trading. The goal is to deliver a trustless platform that matches the speed and efficiency of traditional trading engines while providing full transparency by running execution as close as possible to the blockchain itself.

Position Overview

We are seeking a Senior Rust Backend Engineer experienced in building high-performance, reliable trading APIs (HTTP & WebSocket). You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing the backend services that power our exchange interfaces - ensuring low latency, resilience, and correctness under load.

You’ll work on high-throughput, real-time systems that handle order and trade data ingestion, manage live WebSocket feeds, and maintain internal state consistency from streaming market events. The ideal candidate is both a strong Rust engineer and a system thinker, capable of reasoning about concurrency, data flow, and observability in production environments.

This role offers an opportunity to shape the architecture of our trading backend at an early stage, working alongside a distributed team of seasoned engineers building next-generation financial infrastructure.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and build high-performance trading APIs (HTTP & WebSocket) to support low-latency order entry, market data, and account updates.
• Implement structured concurrency using the Tokio runtime - ensuring proper task lifecycle and cancellation handling.
• Develop and maintain real-time state ingestion pipelines:
  • Process append-only logs (e.g., trades, order updates, book diffs).
  • Rebuild local states efficiently using snapshot + diff application.
• Model trading-related data structures, including orders, fills, trades, positions, funding, and liquidation logic.
• Implement WebSocket connection logic, including upgrade handling, frame parsing, and data fanout for subscribed clients.
• Design observable backend systems with rich metrics, structured logging, and distributed tracing for performance insights and failure analysis.
• Collaborate with system and infrastructure engineers to continuously improve performance, scalability, and fault tolerance.
• Write comprehensive unit, integration, and load tests to ensure stability under production conditions.

Requirements

Rust Expertise

• 3+ years of professional Rust experience, with all the following applied in production systems:
  • Strong experience with the Tokio async runtime and concurrent programming patterns.
  • Deep understanding of structured concurrency and robust handling of spawned task cancellation.
  • Hands-on experience with HTTP and WebSocket frameworks such as Hyper or similar.

Trading Literacy

• Solid understanding of CEX/DEX systems and trading models.
• Familiarity with data modeling for trading entities (orders, trades, positions, funding, mark price, margin, liquidation logic, etc.).
• Prior hands‑on trading or market data experience (personal or professional).

State Ingestion & Processing

• Expertise in real-time data streaming and processing systems.
• Ability to design systems that rebuild local state efficiently from snapshots and diffs.

WebSocket Engineering

• Understanding of connection upgrades, frame parsing, and data fanout for subscribed clients.

Observability Engineering

• Ability to design and instrument systems for metrics, logging, and tracing.
• Experience with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry in production.

Big Bonus

Performance Engineering

• Deep understanding of lock-free or lock-avoidant data structures
• Experience designing cache‑friendly data layouts and optimizing for memory locality in latency‑sensitive systems.
• Proficiency in profiling CPU and memory performance and able to diagnose and optimize latencies in real‑time event pipelines

DevOps & CI/CD

• Familiarity with Docker‑based environments and CI/CD pipelines.

Why Join Us

• Work on cutting‑edge trading infrastructure bridging traditional and decentralized finance.
• Collaborate with a world‑class, distributed engineering team.
• Influence critical technical decisions from the early stages.
• Competitive compensation and growth opportunities in a rapidly evolving space.