Software Engineer - Database

Compensation: $96K - $192K per year

BUILDING THE FUTURE OF OPEN FINANCE

Payward - the parent company behind Kraken, NinjaTrader, Breakout, xStocks, Payward Services and CF Benchmarks - has spent the last 15 years building one of the most modern and globally accessible financial infrastructure platforms in the industry, built to advance an open, global financial system.

THE TEAM

Bitnomial is building the next generation US-based global derivatives exchange, starting with digital assets and progressively expanding to encompass a full spectrum of commodities worldwide. Bitnomial operates a US CFTC regulated exchange (DCM), clearinghouse (DCO), and brokerage (FCM). It offers a range of crypto-settled derivatives, including futures, options, and a suite of live perpetual futures, used by brokers, hedge funds, institutions, and trading firms around the world.

Bitnomial's exchange, clearinghouse, and brokerage systems are written largely in Haskell. In this role you will build the services and data models that record every order, fill, and settlement at a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, with the database as a first-class part of the design. You will build features across these systems and design the schema, queries, and migrations behind them.

THE OPPORTUNITY

• Build, test, and ship well-typed, well-reviewed features and fixes in Haskell services across the exchange, clearinghouse, and brokerage
• Understand the order, trade, clearing, and settlement flows end to end
• Design schema, constraints, and indexes for new features, using exact numeric types and audit trails so financial values cannot drift
• Write migrations that are lock-safe and reversible on large tables, and review the migrations of other engineers
• Read execution plans, find slow queries from production metrics, and fix the cause in the query, the index, or the access pattern
• Monitor systems, respond to alerts, and support daily operations such as settlement cycles
• Fix the cause of production issues and write down what you learned

WHAT YOU BRING

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience with a functional or strongly typed programming language such as Haskell, Rust, or C++
• Strong SQL and PostgreSQL skills, including transactions and isolation levels
• Solid computer science fundamentals, including data structures, concurrency, and distributed systems: replication, consistency, retries and idempotency, and how services keep shared data correct when parts fail
• Willingness to take part in on-call and operational shifts
• Care and rigor with code and data that move money. You measure before you tune
• Good judgment with AI tools. You use them to work faster, and you read, test, and understand what they produce before you ship it
• A habit of asking why before changing something
• Sound judgment under pressure, with a calm and methodical approach when production is live
• Collaboration across engineering, operations, risk, and compliance, with a habit of documenting

NICE TO HAVES

• Financial knowledge or experience in trading, markets, or financial services
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience
• Haskell experience, particularly with PostgreSQL-backed services
• Production experience with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL
• Experience with time series or market data at volume, such as tick data, order books, or event streams
• Experience with Atlas or another declarative schema management tool

Unless a specific application deadline is stated in the job posting, applications are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Please note, applicants are permitted to redact or remove information on their resume that identifies age, date of birth, or dates of attendance at or graduation from an educational institution.

We consider qualified applicants with criminal histories for employment on our team, assessing candidates in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

OUR COMMITMENT

Payward is powered by people from around the world and we celebrate the diverse talents, backgrounds, contributions, and unique perspectives that everyone brings to the table. We hire based on merit, seeking out people with the right abilities, knowledge, and skills for the job. We encourage you to apply for roles where you don't fully meet the listed requirements, especially if you're passionate or knowledgeable about crypto.

We may ask candidates to complete job-related skills or work-style assessments as part of our hiring process. These assessments evaluate competencies relevant to the role and are applied consistently across candidates for similar positions. Results are considered alongside experience and interviews, and are not the sole basis for any employment decision.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don't tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind, whether based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

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