Lead Quant Engineer

Toxic Flow Labs; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity package

Job summary

Toxic Flow Labs is building a groundbreaking CLOB DEX with an on-chain order book, focusing on speed and composability. We seek a senior engineer to design and optimize core trading systems powering Kuru Exchange, including execution engines and market-making infrastructure.

The role emphasizes correctness, scalability, and low latency, with opportunities to shape architecture, lead initiatives, and contribute to state-of-the-art crypto trading infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing high-performance, low-latency trading systems.
• Experience with complex production trading systems and distributed architectures.
• Strong knowledge of concurrency, networking, and performance optimization.
• Focus on correctness, scalability, and low latency.
• Interest in decentralized finance and crypto market structure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize core trading systems including execution, market making, and pricing.
• Prototype quantitative models and trading strategies to improve liquidity and execution.
• Develop low-latency, scalable trading infrastructure with reliability.
• Collaborate with protocol, backend, and infra engineers on new features.
• Analyze market microstructure and production data to boost performance.

Skills

High-performance systems

Low-latency design

Distributed systems

Algorithms & data structures

Team leadership / ownership

Crypto markets / market microstructure

EVM-based blockchain knowledge

Tools

EVM-based ecosystems

Job description

At Toxic Flow Labs, we are building the foundation for global markets with a focus on speed, composability, and security. Our flagship product, Kuru Exchange, is a CLOB DEX built natively on Monad, bringing the speed and capital efficiency of centralized exchanges on-chain. Our key differentiation is an EVM-native, fully on-chain order book that unlocks a new standard for trading infrastructure in crypto.

We've raised a total of $13.8M, led by Paradigm and Electric Capital, and are now focused on building a world-class team.

Role & Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize the core trading systems powering the exchange, including execution, market making, and pricing infrastructure.

• Prototype, and implement quantitative models and trading strategies to improve liquidity, execution quality, and market efficiency.

• Build highly performant, low-latency systems with a focus on correctness, scalability, and reliability.

• Work closely with protocol, backend, and infrastructure engineers to design and implement new exchange features and trading primitives.

• Analyze market microstructure, trading behavior, and production data to identify opportunities for improving execution, incentives, and system performance.

• Drive the technical direction and architecture of the trading stack, balancing performance, maintainability, and operational simplicity.

• Lead technical discussions, and foster a culture of ownership, high engineering standards, and continuous learning.

• Stay abreast of advances in quantitative finance, decentralized finance, and distributed systems, evaluating and integrating new ideas where appropriate.

Required

• 5+ years of experience designing and building high-performance, low-latency trading systems , such as execution engines, order management systems, market making infrastructure, matching engines.

• Demonstrated experience architecting and operating complex production trading systems , with a strong understanding of concurrency, networking, distributed systems, and performance optimization.

• Ability to reason about systems across multiple levels of abstraction to identify and eliminate performance bottlenecks.

• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and systems design, with a focus on correctness, scalability, and latency-critical software.

• A demonstrated track record of high agency, willingness to dive into unfamiliar technical and non-technical areas and a team first attitude.

• Passion for decentralized finance, market microstructure, and building the next generation of financial infrastructure.

Preferred

• Experience building infrastructure for crypto markets , including centralized or decentralized exchanges, market making systems, MEV, or execution platforms.

• Hands-on experience with blockchain systems, preferably EVM-based ecosystems.

• Experience leading small engineering teams.

Why work with us?

• Challenging problems
  You'll work on difficult, novel problems at the intersection of exchange design, low-latency systems, smart contracts, and crypto market structure. Many of these problems simply haven't existed in this form before.

• Build from first principles
  We are pioneering an EVM-native, fully on-chain order book. You'll have the opportunity to help define how this category of trading infrastructure is built, rather than simply improving on an established playbook.

• Huge opportunity
  Monad's Parallel EVM makes it possible to build high-performance applications that were previously impractical on the EVM. Kuru is using that performance to bring a CEX-like trading experience and capital efficiency on a decentralized blockchain.

• High ownership, exceptional team
  We're a small team, so your work will have a direct and visible impact on the product, architecture, and company. You'll work alongside highly driven people who care deeply about quality, move quickly, and keep egos low.

• Culture and compensation
  We're a lean, collaborative team working toward ambitious goals. As an early member, you'll help shape how we work and what we build. You'll also receive a competitive salary and equity package.