Staff Engineer – Variational (Rust)

As a Staff Engineer (Variational) in Rust at deCircle, you own critical, high-throughput backend systems processing billions in daily volume for a peer-to-peer derivatives protocol. You join a lean, high-output team of predominantly engineers from top trading firms and tech companies, building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of decentralized derivatives.

What you'll do

• Design and build backend systems for high-frequency trading, derivatives settlement infrastructure, and client-facing fullstack applications
• Architect distributed systems including consistency protocols, multi-service communication, asynchronous queues, and real-time processing
• Own database design and optimization across relational, time-series, flat-file, and OLAP systems
• Build and maintain production infrastructure including CI/CD, containerized deployments, monitoring, tracing, and alerting
• Implement backend security including JWT authentication, WAF configuration, and least-privilege systems
• Manage infrastructure as code using Terraform

What you bring

• 5+ years of backend development experience in trading platforms, distributed systems, or similar domains
• Strong experience in Rust (preferred), C++, or similar systems languages. Go or Java acceptable only with a deep distributed systems background, not dev tooling focused
• Strong expertise in distributed systems and database design
• Production infrastructure experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform or AWS CDK, CI/CD pipelines, and monitoring and alerting systems
• Solid software engineering background (L5+ minimum, L6 strongly preferred) with ownership of high-impact systems

Nice to have

• Experience with trading platforms, dashboards, or DeFi
• Knowledge of market making, HFT, or similar domains
• Rust proficiency if coming from a C++ or Go background
• Experience with PostgreSQL and Redis or Memcached
• Crypto or Web3 experience

About deCircle

deCircle is building foundational infrastructure for decentralized derivatives, providing a peer-to-peer protocol for trading, clearing, and settlement of perpetuals. The company has facilitated hundreds of billions in trading volume and recently closed a $50M+ round backed by Bain Capital Crypto, Peak XV (Sequoia), Coinbase Ventures, Dragonfly, and Hack VC.