Principal Software Engineer — Trade & Blockchain

What You’ll Do

• Write and own substantial amounts of production code in the most complex, high-risk, and business-critical areas of the platform.
• Take end-to-end ownership of system behavior in production, especially under failure, stress, or adversarial conditions.
• Operate confidently in ambiguous problem spaces, defining constraints, risks, and execution paths when clarity does not yet exist.
• Anticipate and neutralize systemic technical, operational, and product risks through careful design, invariants, and operational discipline.
• Simplify complex systems by eliminating accidental complexity, unsafe patterns, and brittle abstractions.
• Set technical direction primarily through reference implementations, durable abstractions, and sustained ownership of core systems.
• Act as one of the strongest technical coaches on the team through high-signal code reviews, design discussions, and example.
• Influence product and technical decisions by deeply understanding system behavior, user incentives, and long-term trade-offs.
• Participate actively in incident response, and ensure durable improvements through root-cause analysis and follow-through.
• Raise the bar for correctness, reliability, and operability by making the right designs and behaviors the default for others.

What We’re Looking For

We’re looking for exceptional individual contributors who consistently demonstrate strong performance across our core competencies, and who provide outsized leverage through a small number of exceptional strengths.

In particular, you should have:

• A track record of owning and evolving complex, production-critical systems.
• Exceptional engineering judgment in ambiguous, high-risk, or adversarial environments.
• Deep comfort reasoning about failure modes, edge cases, and second- or third-order effects.
• Strong operational ownership, including designing for observability, safe failure, and recoverability.
• The ability to simplify complex systems without losing essential correctness or safety.
• A demonstrated ability to influence others through code quality, design clarity, and technical credibility.
• Clear, precise communication, especially when articulating risks, trade-offs, and system behavior.

Nice to Have

• Deep domain expertise in trading systems, exchange mechanics, or financial infrastructure.
• Expertise in one or more high-leverage areas such as:
  • Reliability and operational excellence
  • Adversarial or incentive-aware system design
  • Architectural simplification and technical leverage
  • Deterministic, performance-sensitive, or event-driven systems
• Experience operating systems under significant load, stress, or real-world failure scenarios.

This Role Is Not a Fit If

• You prefer narrowly scoped work with clearly defined requirements.
• You are uncomfortable owning ambiguous, high-risk problems end-to-end.
• You avoid deep production ownership or incident responsibility.
• You prefer influencing through authority or process rather than through technical leadership.
• You are not interested in remaining deeply hands-on as an individual contributor.

How Success Is Measured

Success in this role is measured by:

• The long-term correctness, stability, and clarity of the systems you anchor.
• Reduction of systemic risk and classes of failure over time.
• How much easier it becomes for others to do the right thing because of your work.
• The degree to which your technical judgment is trusted on the hardest problems.

Final Note

Principal Engineers here are not managers and not detached architects. They are exceptional ICs who take responsibility for the hardest problems and make the organization meaningfully stronger by doing the work that only they can do.

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