Backend Engineer

Austin Community College; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Austin Community College is looking for a Founding Backend & Systems Engineer to architect and build core infrastructure for their consumer platform. You will own backend layers including streaming infrastructure and distributed systems, focusing on latency and reliability in real-time applications.

Ideal candidates have strong skills in backend engineering with experience in languages like Go, Python, and C++. You will work closely with AI and product teams, ensuring system performance and scalability. A meaningful opportunity in a dynamic startup environment awaits you.

Qualifications

• Strong backend and distributed systems engineering experience.
• Experience building low-latency or performance-critical systems.
• Ability to operate independently in high-ambiguity startup environments.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build low-latency backend systems powering real-time consumer products.
• Design distributed systems for ingesting, processing, and serving massive multimodal datasets.
• Develop infrastructure connecting prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and external event streams.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Go

Python

C++

Node.js

Event streaming

Tools

Docker

Kafka

Redis

Job description

About Astera

Astera is building the canonical intelligence and execution layer for event‑driven markets. Our platform connects prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and broader real‑world event systems into a unified intelligence and decision infrastructure powered by multimodal AI, world models, and real‑time market reasoning.

We are building:

• multimodal agent architectures
• institutional‑grade APIs for both consumer and B2B products

This is not a conventional backend role. The systems being built sit at the intersection of:

• distributed systems
• AI‑native applications

The Role

We are hiring a Founding Backend & Systems Engineer to architect and build the core infrastructure powering Astera’s consumer platform, intelligence systems, and institutional APIs.

You will own critical backend and systems layers including:

• streaming infrastructure
• distributed event systems
• multimodal inference pipelines
• production reliability

You should be capable of operating across:

• systems architecture
• infrastructure
• performance optimization
• data‑intensive distributed systems

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive building performance‑critical systems under real‑world scale and latency constraints.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build low‑latency backend systems powering real‑time consumer products
• Design distributed systems for ingesting, processing, and serving massive multimodal datasets
• Build scalable APIs for both consumer applications and institutional B2B offerings
• Develop infrastructure connecting prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and external event streams
• Optimize systems for latency, throughput, reliability, and fault tolerance
• Build production infrastructure supporting multimodal AI and agentic systems
• Develop data pipelines for real‑time and historical market/event processing
• Work closely with AI, product, and quant teams to productionize research systems
• Own deployment, observability, reliability, and backend performance across the platform
• Design systems capable of scaling to institutional‑grade workloads and API usage

Qualifications

Required

• Strong backend and distributed systems engineering experience
• Experience building low‑latency or performance‑critical systems
• Strong programming ability in languages such as:
  • Go
  • Rust
  • C++
  • Python
  • TypeScript/Node.js
• Deep understanding of:
  • concurrency
  • networking
  • distributed systems
  • databases
  • caching
  • systems performance
• Experience designing scalable APIs and data‑intensive backend services
• Strong understanding of production infrastructure and cloud‑native systems
• Experience working with large‑scale datasets and streaming architectures
• Ability to operate independently in high‑ambiguity startup environments

Preferred Experience

• High‑throughput distributed systems
• Event streaming
• Real‑time market systems
• Exchange infrastructure
• Performance‑critical backend environments

Experience with:

• Kafka
• Pulsar
• ClickHouse
• Redis
• Timescale
• OLAP systems

AI‑Native Infrastructure

• Inference orchestration
• RAG systems
• Agentic systems
• GPU‑aware infrastructure

Consumer Product Engineering

• High‑scale consumer applications
• Trading systems
• Social/discovery products
• Event‑driven applications

B2B Platform Infrastructure

• Institutional APIs
• SDKs
• Enterprise integrations
• Highly reliable external‑facing infrastructure

Technical Stack

• Go
• Rust
• C++
• Python
• Node.js/TypeScript

Infrastructure & Cloud

• Docker
• GCP / AWS
• Terraform
• gRPC
• NATS
• Kafka
• Redis

Databases & Data Systems

• ClickHouse
• TimescaleDB
• Elasticsearch
• OLAP systems

AI / Data Infrastructure

• PyTorch inference systems
• Ray
• LangGraph
• Streaming inference pipelines
• GPU‑aware orchestration
• Distributed ML serving systems

What We Look For

• Strong systems intuition
• High engineering rigor
• Deep performance awareness
• Reasoning about scale, latency, and reliability
• Ownership mentality
• Comfort operating under ambiguity
• Pragmatic engineering judgment
• Interest in frontier AI‑native systems

We care far more about technical depth and systems thinking than pedigree.

Nice‑to‑Have Backgrounds

• High‑frequency trading infrastructure
• Exchange systems
• Real‑time analytics platforms
• Quantitative finance infrastructure
• Distributed databases
• Large‑scale consumer applications
• Autonomous systems infrastructure
• Streaming media systems
• Space/aerospace systems
• Performance‑critical robotics infrastructure

Compensation

• Meaningful equity participation
• Opportunity to help architect foundational infrastructure from day one

Location

NYC

To Apply

• Resume / LinkedIn
• GitHub or technical portfolio
• Representative systems or infrastructure projects

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