Backend Engineer

Company Overview

hermeneutic research is a best-in-class proprietary trading firm and hedge fund. It deploys research-driven discretionary and systematic strategies as well as makes strategic long-term investments. The partners' decade-long history of success in trading and business building and a firm-wide cultural emphasis on alpha generation, open debate, relentless iteration, and teamwork are key to the firm's continued expansion in a challenging market environment that has hamstrung competitors. A hard-wired emphasis on risk management and opportunistic market participation ensure that hermeneutic research will continue its growth trajectory in the coming decades.

Job Overview

We are seeking a seasoned Backend Engineer to help build high-performance, cloud-native infrastructure to support our research, trading, and data pipelines. This role is crucial to enabling real-time data ingestion and processing workflows, and ensuring our systems can meet the demands of a high-uptime, low-latency trading environment.

The ideal candidate brings deep production experience with Go and modern distributed systems, or comparable depth in other backend languages. They have extensive experience in production-grade system design and a strong operational mindset. You will work closely with trading, infrastructure, and data teams to design and maintain systems that are fast, reliable, and observable.

This is a critical position at the technical core of the firm, ideal for individuals who thrive in fast-moving environments and care deeply about performance, robustness, and continuous improvement

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of robust high-performance, cloud-native backend systems using Go that support real-time data processing and low-latency workflows.
• Drive engineering excellence through code quality, best practices, and mentorship of other team members.
• Make effective use of AI-assisted and agentic development workflows to accelerate delivery, while taking full ownership of the quality, correctness, performance, and maintainability of the resulting code.
• Work closely with trading, product, and infrastructure teams to understand system requirements and deliver performant solutions.
• Take ownership of production services, ensuring reliability, observability, and performance tuning. Optimize systems performance and ensure system stability, reliability, and security.
• Contribute to infrastructure automation and CI/CD improvements to support rapid deployment and operational agility.
• Conduct in-depth code reviews, lead technical discussions, and influence engineering culture and standards.
• Implement automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and participate in code reviews and design discussions.
• Deploy and manage services leveraging cloud-native tools and best practices
• Monitor, debug, and troubleshoot production systems and be a part of the on-call incident response team in a high-uptime environment.

Must Have

• 5+ years of backend development experience building and supporting production-grade systems, with strong experience in distributed, high-availability, and/or high-throughput environments.
• 3+ years professional experience building and operating production systems in Go, or a deep professional backend engineering background combined with experience using agentic development workflows.
• Strong knowledge of concurrency, memory management, performance, and optimization, with the ability to apply these principles effectively to Go-based systems.
• Experience leading large-scale system design and mentoring engineers on engineering best practices.
• Proven track record of designing and deploying microservice architectures in high-availability, high-throughput environments.
• Solid understanding of message queues, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous processing.
• Strong understanding of networking data transmission protocols (TCP, UDP, WSS, etc.) and of service-to-service API design with REST/gRPC.
• Experience building and deploying cloud-native applications.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies (Docker) and orchestration engines (e.g., ECS, Kubernetes).
• Proficiency with message brokers (e.g., Kafka, Redpanda) and distributed systems.
• Knowledge of data storage technologies such as PostgreSQL, Redis, and time-series databases like ClickHouse or TimescaleDB.

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of Rust, C++, Python, particularly in data-intensive or performance-sensitive applications.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Experience deploying and operating production systems on public cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Experience with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Background in crypto, high-frequency trading, or real-time market data systems.
• Knowledge of crypto exchanges market data and order routing protocols
• Contributions to open-source projects or a strong technical blog/portfolio.

Interview Process

1. CV Screening – We will review your application based on the qualifications and experience outlined above.
2. Assignment – A take-home assignment to demonstrate your approach, critical thinking, and relevant skills.
3. Assignment Review – A discussion of your assignment, focusing on your approach, reasoning, and solutions.
4. CTO Interview – Interview with the CTO to discuss your experience, technical expertise, problem-solving approach, and overall fit for the role.
5. Co-Founder Interview – A concluding discussion to evaluate cultural fit, strategic alignment, and how you resonate with the firm's values.

Company Values

Throughout the process, you'll be assessed for cultural fit through our company values:

• Drive – We believe the best team members are deeply passionate about what they do. That passion fuels their growth, drives them to seek out the best teams, and leads them to hold high expectations of themselves in pursuit of excellence.
• Ownership – We aim to extend ownership as broadly as possible across the firm. In return, we value people who take initiative, step up when needed, and treat the company’s goals as their own.
• Judgment – We value those who see the big picture and focus on what truly drives impact and results. They use time wisely, adapt across domains, and always prioritize outcomes over comfort zones.
• Openness – We foster a culture of open communication, mutual challenge, and shared growth. We believe constructive debate and proactive knowledge sharing lead us closer to the truth—and better decisions.
• Competence – We work with people who bring exceptional intellectual strength. What sets them apart isn’t just what they know—it’s how they use what they know to navigate change, adapt quickly, and contribute meaningfully in fast-changing environments.
• Resilience – We perform under pressure. Markets move fast, and so do we—but we stay grounded, focused, and calm. We embrace uncertainty, learn from setbacks, and adapt quickly without losing sight of long-term goals.