Distinguished Engineer

AlgoChains; United States; On-site; USD 260,000 - 480,000; Full time

Job summary

AlgoChains is building the app store for automated investing with a validated strategy marketplace and live capital integration. We seek a Distinguished Engineer to define the platform roadmap, set architecture standards, and lead through technical authority without traditional management layers.

You will own critical systems, drive safety and audit capabilities, and mentor senior engineers while collaborating with founders and product leaders to scale subscriber-ready infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering with staff/principal level leadership.
• Shipped and operated production fintech platform with real value at risk.
• Production Python and TypeScript; Postgres; multi-tenant data isolation.
• Distributed systems experience: APIs, data pipelines, secrets, deploy safety.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute a long-term, scalable platform roadmap with strong security and multi-tenant isolation.
• Influence executive decisions and align technical capability with business goals.
• Own critical production components (brokerage integration, billing, audit trails, tenant isolation).
• Mentor Staff and Principal engineers to scale technical leadership.

Skills

Python

TypeScript

Postgres

Distributed systems

Architecture leadership

Communication

Security posture

Remote-friendly

Tools

FastAPI

MCP

Supabase

Postgres

Job description

AlgoChains is building the app store for automated investing — a validated strategy marketplace where traders subscribe to vetted bots, connect their own brokerage, and run automation without giving up custody. Four futures strategies trade live on real capital today; subscribers get institutional-style infrastructure (risk controls, telemetry, and AI automation) without being a hedge fund or broker.

We need a Distinguished Engineer to serve as the primary technical visionary for our platform — live execution, marketplace, and the AI agent control tower. This is an executive-level individual contributor role. You will define the technical roadmap for our most critical systems, set company-wide architecture standards, and solve the hard problems that decide whether founder-operated live bots become subscriber-ready, multi-tenant infrastructure.

You will not manage a traditional team. You will lead through technical authority, written standards, architecture reviews, and mentorship of Staff and Principal-equivalent engineers. Strategy logic, risk limits, and live-bot parameter changes stay owner-gated — you design the systems that make those gates enforceable.

This is a fintech engineering role, not a quant role. We already have the strategies. What we need is the engineer who has built the rails real money runs on: brokerage connectivity and OAuth, idempotent order plumbing, ledgers and entitlements, subscription billing, audit trails, tenant isolation, and the compliance posture of a regulated product — at a brokerage, payments company, neobank, exchange, or trading platform. If you have shipped a system like that to production and lived with it afterward, you are who we are looking for. If your background is quant research without the platform, this is not the fit.

Hard requirement: you have already built something like this. We will ask you to walk us through a comparable platform you personally architected and shipped — where user funds or live orders moved through code you were accountable for — including what broke, what you changed, and what you would do differently. This is not a first-time-at-scale role.

What you'll do

• Drive technical strategy: Architect the long-term platform — scalable, secure, and resilient enough for years of subscriber growth. Publish a 12-month roadmap the rest of engineering can execute against.
• Influence executive decisions: Partner with the CEO, Head of Technology, and product/quant leads so deep technical capability lines up with business objectives. There is no VP layer between you and the decision.
• Own the critical path: Live execution (Tradovate, Alpaca), Command Center, Supabase-backed marketplace and billing, and the MCP agent layer (~500 production tools). Safety and audit on real capital.
• Lead through innovation: Champion modern engineering practices — multi-tenant isolation, fail-closed data paths, deploy safety, broker-state verification — without turning the company into process theater.
• Foster engineering excellence: Be the critical advisor on high-stakes architecture reviews. Establish standards so Staff/Principal work is judged against real broker and system state, not estimates.
• Mentor future leaders: Cultivate, mentor, and sponsor Staff and Principal-equivalent engineers so technical leadership scales without adding management layers.

First-year mission

Ship a production architecture that lets a subscriber connect their own brokerage and run validated strategies without AlgoChains touching funds — with multi-tenant isolation, fail-closed data paths, and a documented technical roadmap the rest of engineering can execute against.

What success looks like (first 90 days)

• Map the current Control Tower / Command Center / MCP / live-bot blast radius and publish the 12-month platform roadmap
• Land one high-stakes architecture change that reduces operational risk (secrets, tenant isolation, deploy safety, or broker-state verification)
• Establish company-wide review standards so Staff/Principal work is reviewed against real broker/system state, not estimates

Who you are

• You have built this before: You have personally architected, shipped, and operated a production fintech platform where real money or live orders moved — brokerage integration, payments, ledgers, or a regulated multi-tenant financial product. You can name it, and you can explain the failure modes from memory.
• A fintech platform authority: Deep expertise in the infrastructure under financial products — connectivity to brokers or payment rails, entitlement and billing systems, audit and reconciliation, and the security posture regulators expect. Trading-strategy or quant background is welcome but not required; the platform is the job.
• Recognized under pressure: You are known, internally or externally, as someone who can hold an architecture line when the incident is live and the money is real.
• A master communicator: You translate complex systems into clear strategic narratives for founders and non-technical stakeholders.
• A collaborative leader: You lead by influence, not mandate. You build consensus across product, quant, and engineering and break down technical silos.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering, with significant time leading architecture at a Staff, Principal, or director-equivalent level
• Required: shipped and operated at least one production fintech platform — brokerage, payments, lending, exchange, neobank, or trading infrastructure — where you were accountable for the path real money took through the system
• Required: proven experience driving architectural transformations that retired technical debt and supported real user or volume growth on that platform, not on a greenfield prototype
• Production Python and TypeScript; comfort with Postgres (schemas, RLS, multi-tenant data isolation)
• Track record on distributed systems — APIs, data pipelines, secrets, deploy safety, and fail-closed paths when a source is down
• Ownership mindset: you write the standard, review against it, and stay close enough to the runtime to know when it is lying
• Clear written communication — we are remote-first and async-heavy
• Public-facing technical contributions, patents, open-source leadership, or technical publication is highly preferred

Nice to have

• Direct trading or market-data exposure — broker websockets, fills, bracket orders (not FIX/HFT desk requirements, and not quant research)
• Stripe subscriptions, entitlement systems, or usage metering at scale
• MCP, FastAPI, or multi-agent orchestration at production scale
• Security-aware engineering (auth, secrets, least-privilege, audit trails) — founder background is CTI/fintech security
• Experience taking a founder-operated production system to a platform other engineers can safely extend
• Regulatory exposure — SEC/FINRA, CFTC/NFA, PCI, or SOC 2 — from the engineering side

Compensation

• Salary: negotiable — tell us your number; we scope the role to the person, not a band
• Equity: strong early-stage grant, sized for a founding-level technical leader
• Remote-first, async-heavy, US-hours overlap preferred

Who thrives here

• You would rather ship a smaller, correct architecture than a large, unverified one
• You get uncomfortable when data is unverified — you check the broker, the database, and the deploy path
• You can hold a 12-month platform line and still land one high-stakes change in the first quarter
• You do not need a large org to have impact; you ask when blocked, write it down, and move the system forward