Founding Platform Engineer

Quiet Capital; Oregon (WI); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Arcade is seeking a Staff+ backend engineer to turn an original crypto product vision into a robust, scalable system. You will own data, rewards, notifications, and API surface while ensuring reliability across a high-velocity stack.

You will integrate perps and spot engines, unify provider data into one truth, and optimize for fast, resilient data delivery. Remote, async-first role with top-tier equity.

Qualifications

• Experience building backend systems for high-availability crypto apps.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems and API design.
• Proficient in TypeScript or similar typed languages and modern tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform stack: data layer, rewards, notifications, API surface and reliability.
• Integrate the trading engine: perps via Hyperliquid, spot via Jupiter/Relay.
• Consolidate providers into a single source of truth.
• Serve heavy data: caching strategies and scalable fan-out.
• Make a unified USDC balance across chains invisible to users.
• Maintain peak reliability; prevent crashes; ensure graceful failure.

Skills

TypeScript

Go

Rust

APIs

Distributed systems

Tools

PostgreSQL

Solana via @solana/kit

AWS

Express

Drizzle

Job description

About Arcade

We're the team behind PRJX, the #1 DEX on HyperEVM, which generated $5.4M revenue in year one with 2 full time people.

Now, we're pursuing the biggest opportunity in crypto.

The foundation of which is creating the best place to trade crypto (spot + perps) on your phone.

On top of that, we're building a completely original social product with several novel mechanisms.

We'll reveal more to promising candidates, but whatever you think it may be, think bigger.

Role

Staff+ level · $200,000+ · significant equity

Current stack. TypeScript/Node · Express 5 · Postgres with Drizzle · pnpm monorepo · Awilix · Vitest · AWS (SQS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch) · Solana via @solana/kit · viem. You'll have the authority to rewrite what doesn't meet the bar.

Details. Remote · NA/EU timezone ideal · Full-time · Primarily async

You're the first and only engineer in your domain. Your job is to take an original product vision and turn it into a robust system, holding the entire architecture and smallest details at once.

This is a role for top 1% devs. You'd trust yourself to architect this from zero to $100M/day in two months, and fix critical prod bugs at that scale the hour they land.

You will…

• Own the platform: data layer, rewards, notifications, the API surface, and its reliability.

• Integrate the trading engine: perps through Hyperliquid, spot through Jupiter and Relay.

• Turn providers that disagree (Zerion, CoinGecko, Mobula, Alchemy, Hyperliquid) into one source of truth.

• Serve heavy data fast: caching that survives a stampede, fan-out that holds.

• Make one USDC balance across chains invisible to the user.

• Hold the line at peak: apps in this category lag and crash; ours can't, and a user can always close a position.

You have…

• Kept a system alive through a 50x spike in ten minutes, and decided in advance what to shed.

• Built rewards and accounting that survive retries: idempotency, replay safety, lot tracking.

• Accounted for a latency budget end to end: tap to on screen.

• Fixed Postgres bottlenecks in Postgres, not with a second database.

• Deep in a typed backend language (TypeScript, Go, or Rust), and productive in a codebase that isn't yours; EVM at read level.