Senior Backend Developer

About the Role

At Ceryneian, we’re building a next-generation, research-driven algorithmic trading platform aimed at democratizing access to hedge fund-grade financial analytics. Headquartered in California, Ceryneian is a fintech innovation company dedicated to empowering traders with sophisticated yet accessible tools for quantitative research, strategy development, and execution.

Our flagship platform is currently under development. As a Backend Engineer, you will play a foundational role in designing and building the core trading engine and research infrastructure from the ground up. Your work will focus on developing performance-critical components that power backtesting, real-time strategy execution, and seamless integration with brokers and data providers. You’ll be responsible for bridging core engine logic with Python-based strategy interfaces, supporting a modular system architecture for isolated and scalable strategy execution, and building robust abstractions for data handling and API interactions. This role is central to delivering the reliability, flexibility, and performance that our users will rely on in fast-moving financial markets.

We are a remote-first team and are open to hiring exceptional candidates globally.

Core Tasks

·      Build and maintain the trading engine core for execution, backtesting, and event logging.

·      Develop isolated strategy execution runners to support multi-user, multi-strategy environments.

·      Implement abstraction layers for brokers and market data feeds to offer a unified API experience.

·      Bridge the core engine language with Python strategies using gRPC, ZeroMQ, or similar interop technologies.

·      Implement logic to parse and execute JSON-based strategy DSL from the strategy builder.

·      Design compute-optimized components for multi-asset workflows and scalable backtesting.

·      Capture real-time state, performance metrics, and slippage for both live and simulated runs.

·      Collaborate with infrastructure engineers to support high-availability deployments.

Top Technical Competencies

·      Proficiency in distributed systems, concurrency, and system design.

·      Strong backend/server-side development skills using C++, Rust, C#, Erlang, or Python.

·      Deep understanding of data structures and algorithms with a focus on low-latency performance.

·      Experience with event-driven and messaging-based architectures (e.g., ZeroMQ, Redis Streams).

·      Familiarity with Linux-based environments and system-level performance tuning.

Bonus Competencies

·      Understanding of financial markets, asset classes, and algorithmic trading strategies.

·      3–5 years of prior Backend experience.

·      Hands-on experience with backtesting frameworks or financial market simulators.

·      Experience with sandboxed execution environments or paper trading platforms.

·      Advanced knowledge of multithreading, memory optimization, or compiler construction.

·      Educational background from Tier-I or Tier-II institutions with strong computer science fundamentals, a passion for scalable system design, and a drive to build cutting-edge fintech infrastructure.

What We Offer

·      Opportunity to shape the backend architecture of a next-gen fintech startup.

·      A collaborative, technically driven culture.

·      Competitive compensation with performance-based bonuses.

·      Flexible working hours and a remote-friendly environment for candidates across the globe.

·      Exposure to financial modeling, trading infrastructure, and real-time applications.

·      Collaboration with a world-class team from Pomona, UCLA, Harvey Mudd, and Claremont McKenna.

Ideal Candidate

You’re a backend-first thinker who’s obsessed with reliability, latency, and architectural flexibility. You enjoy building scalable systems that transform complex strategy logic into high-performance, real-time trading actions. You think in microseconds, architect for fault tolerance, and build APIs designed for developer extensibility.

Responsibilities:

• Take on complex problems that span multiple components and teams.

• Independently own one or more multiple modules, which include: requirement analysis, design, development, maintenance & support

• Write extensive, efficient code to address complex modules that handle the interaction between multiple components.

• Rapidly iterate to add new functionalities and solves complex problems with simple and intuitive solutions

• Produce architecture with clean interfaces, that are efficient and scalable

• Participate and contribute to architectural discussions

• Solve production issues. Investigate and provide solutions to minimize the business impact due to the outage

• Continuously improve performance metrics of modules you own.

• Collaborate effectively across teams to solve problems, execute and deliver results

Requirements:

• Experience: 3+ years

• A Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science

• Software engineering and product delivery experience, with a strong background in algorithms

• Experience in architecting & building real-time, large-scale e-commerce applications

• Experience with high-performance websites catering to millions of daily traffic is a plus

• Excellent command over Data Structures and Algorithms

• Experience with web technologies, Go/Java/Python

• Language: GO or Python

• Strong expertise in DS and Algo

• Strong leadership skills - have experience mentoring, building products from scratch or incumbent in design and architecture.

• Have worked in the scaling of the system right from scratch.

• Someone worked in small user base to a large user base and wrote optimized code

• Both HLD and LLD

Roles and Responsibilities

• Ability to create solution prototype and conduct proof of concept of new tools.

• Work in research and understanding of new tools and areas.

• Clearly articulate pros and cons of various technologies/platforms and perform

detailed analysis of business problems and technical environments to derive a

solution.

• Optimisation of the application for maximum speed and scalability.

• Work on feature development and bug fixing.

Technical skills

• Must have knowledge of the networking in Linux, and basics of computer networks in

general.

• Must have intermediate/advanced knowledge of one programming language,

preferably Python.

• Must have experience of writing shell scripts and configuration files.

• Should be proficient in bash.

• Should have excellent Linux administration capabilities.

• Working experience of SCM. Git is preferred.

• Knowledge of build and CI-CD tools, like Jenkins, Bamboo etc is a plus.

• Understanding of Architecture of OpenStack/Kubernetes is a plus.

• Code contributed to OpenStack/Kubernetes community will be a plus.

• Data Center network troubleshooting will be a plus.

• Understanding of NFV and SDN domain will be a plus.

Soft skills

• Excellent verbal and written communications skills.

• Highly driven, positive attitude, team player, self-learning, self motivating and flexibility

• Strong customer focus - Decent Networking and relationship management

• Flair for creativity and innovation

• Strategic thinking This is an individual contributor role and will need client interaction on technical side.

Must have Skill - Linux, Networking, Python, Cloud

Additional Skills-OpenStack, Kubernetes, Shell, Java, Development

Why you should join us

- You will join the mission to create positive impact on millions of peoples lives

- You get to work on the latest technologies in a culture which encourages experimentation - You get to work with super humans (Psst: Look up these super human1, super human2, super human3, super human4)

- You get to work in an accelerated learning environment

What you will do

- You will provide deep technical expertise to your team in building future ready systems.

- You will collaborate in a highly cross functional team, providing engineering perspective to non technical members of the team

- You will help develop a robust roadmap for ensuring engineering operational excellence

- You will establish clean and optimised coding standards that are well documented

- You will author efficient, reliable and performant systems

- You will design systems, frameworks and libraries that work at scale, are easy to maintain and provide a great developer experience

- You will be agile and curious about customer problems and business objectives

- You will actively mentor and participate in knowledge sharing forums

- You will work in an exciting startup environment where you can be ambitious and try new things :)

You should apply if

- You have a strong foundation in Computer Science concepts and programming fundamentals

- You have been working on backend web technologies since 8+ years

- You have built and maintained reliable systems that operate at high scale

- You’re experienced in building and running cloud-native platforms & distributed systems

- Extensive experience in any web stack (we use Typescript / AWS / DynamoDB / PostgreSQL)

- You understand the hustle of a startup and are good with handling ambiguity

- You are data driven, have customer empathy and enjoy building delightful applications

- You are curious, a quick learner and someone who loves to experiment

- You insist on highest standards of quality, maintainability and performance

- You work well in a team to enhance your impact

• Building scalable web applications
• Integrating UI elements with server-side
• Handling Security and Data Protection
• Integrating front- end with SQL and NoSQL databases and ensuring its consistency
• Building reusable code and libraries
• Optimizing the code to improve its quality and efficiency

• 2+ yrs of Backend development experience
• You have excellent programming skills in python, ORM libraries and Django
• You have experience inbuilt tools like Git, Jenkins, Ansible, Rundeck
• You have experience in cross-browser/cross-platform front-end development with HTML/CSS/Javascript in Angular or similar frameworks
• You are an expert in SQL (Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySql, or similar) and NoSQL (MongoDB, ElasticSearch)
• You design, build and test RESTful web services.
• You have experience with Apache HTTP, NGINX, Tomcat or Jetty.