Senior Backend Engineer - Asian Timezones

Company Overview

Hermeneutic Research is a leading proprietary trading firm and hedge fund that combines research-driven discretionary and systematic strategies with strategic long-term investments. The firm's partners bring a decade of successful trading and business experience. Emphasizing alpha generation, open debate, relentless iteration, and collaboration, the company thrives in competitive markets. Strong risk management and opportunistic market approaches support its continued growth trajectory.

Job Overview

We seek an experienced Backend Engineer to develop high-performance, cloud-native infrastructure supporting research, trading, and data pipelines. The role focuses on enabling real-time data ingestion and processing with high availability and low latency. Candidates should have significant production experience in Go or equivalent backend languages, a strong operational focus, and expertise in building reliable systems. You'll collaborate closely with trading, infrastructure, and data teams to design fast, resilient, and observable solutions.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement robust, high-performance backend systems using Go for real-time and low-latency workflows in a cloud-native environment.
• Promote engineering best practices, quality code, and mentor junior engineers.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools for accelerated delivery while owning code quality, performance, and maintainability.
• Partner with trading, product, and infrastructure teams to understand requirements and craft performant backend solutions.
• Ensure production service reliability, observability, performance tuning, and secure operation.
• Contribute to infrastructure automation and continuous delivery pipelines to enable agile deployments.
• Lead code reviews, technical discussions, and influence engineering culture and standards.
• Implement automated testing and participate in ongoing design enhancements.
• Deploy and maintain services using cloud-native tools and best practices.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and respond to incidents in a high-availability production environment.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of backend development experience building and supporting production-grade systems in distributed, high-availability, or high-throughput settings.
• Minimum 3 years of professional experience in Go backend development or equivalent professional engineering experience leveraging AI-assisted workflows.
• Strong expertise in concurrency, memory management, and system performance optimization applied effectively in Go contexts.
• Experience leading large-scale system design and mentoring engineering teams on best practices.
• Proven ability to design and deploy microservices architectures in highly available and scalable environments.
• Deep understanding of message queues, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous processing.
• Knowledge of network data transmission protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, WSS) and designing service-to-service APIs using REST and gRPC.
• Experience building and operating cloud-native applications.
• Familiarity with Docker and container orchestration platforms such as ECS or Kubernetes.
• Proficiency with message brokers like Kafka or Redpanda and distributed system technologies.
• Knowledge of databases including PostgreSQL, Redis, and time-series databases such as ClickHouse or TimescaleDB.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Rust, C++, or Python, especially in data-intensive or high-performance computing contexts.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code platforms like Terraform or CloudFormation.
• Experience deploying and maintaining production systems on cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Knowledge of observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Background or interest in cryptocurrency markets, high-frequency trading, or real-time market data systems.
• Understanding of crypto exchange market data and order routing protocols.
• Contributions to open source projects or a strong technical portfolio or blog are valued.

Interview Process

• Application review based on qualifications and experience.
• Take-home assignment showcasing problem-solving and technical capabilities.
• Discussion of the assignment including approach and solutions.
• Technical interview with CTO assessing skills and fit.
• Final interview with a co-founder evaluating cultural and strategic alignment.

Company Values

• Drive: Passion for work that inspires growth and high standards.
• Ownership: Initiative and accountability aligned with company goals.
• Judgment: Focus on impactful results, wise time use, adaptability, and prioritization.
• Openness: Culture of transparent communication, constructive debate, and collaboration.
• Competence: Intellectual strength demonstrated through meaningful contributions and adaptability.
• Resilience: Performing calmly under pressure, learning from challenges, and maintaining focus on long-term goals.