Backend Engineer

Backend & Systems Engineer | Low Latency Infrastructure

Astera Holdings
Remote

About Astera

Astera is building the canonical intelligence and execution layer for event-driven markets.

Our platform connects prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and broader real-world event systems into a unified intelligence and decision infrastructure powered by multimodal AI, world models, and real-time market reasoning.

We are building:

• low-latency market infrastructure,
• event-driven intelligence systems,
• multimodal agent architectures,
• real-time data pipelines,
• and institutional-grade APIs for both consumer and B2B products.

This is not a conventional backend role. The systems being built sit at the intersection of:

• real-time market infrastructure,
• distributed systems,
• AI-native applications,
• event processing,
• and large-scale multimodal intelligence.

The Role

We are hiring a Founding Backend & Systems Engineer to architect and build the core infrastructure powering Astera’s consumer platform, intelligence systems, and institutional APIs.

You will own critical backend and systems layers including:

• low-latency services,
• streaming infrastructure,
• distributed event systems,
• multimodal inference pipelines,
• API architecture,
• market data systems,
• and production reliability.

You should be capable of operating across:

• backend engineering,
• systems architecture,
• infrastructure,
• performance optimization,
• and data-intensive distributed systems.

This role is ideal for engineers who thrive building performance-critical systems under real-world scale and latency constraints.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build low-latency backend systems powering real-time consumer products
• Design distributed systems for ingesting, processing, and serving massive multimodal datasets
• Build scalable APIs for both consumer applications and institutional B2B offerings
• Develop infrastructure connecting prediction markets, equities, crypto, sports, and external event streams
• Optimize systems for latency, throughput, reliability, and fault tolerance
• Design streaming architectures for event-driven intelligence pipelines
• Build production infrastructure supporting multimodal AI and agentic systems
• Develop data pipelines for real-time and historical market/event processing
• Work closely with AI, product, and quant teams to productionize research systems
• Own deployment, observability, reliability, and backend performance across the platform
• Design systems capable of scaling to institutional-grade workloads and API usage

Qualifications

Required

• Strong backend and distributed systems engineering experience
• Experience building low-latency or performance-critical systems
• Strong programming ability in languages such as:
  • Go
  • Rust
  • C++
  • Python
  • TypeScript/Node.js
• Deep understanding of:
  • concurrency,
  • networking,
  • distributed systems,
  • databases,
  • caching,
  • and systems performance
• Experience designing scalable APIs and data-intensive backend services
• Strong understanding of production infrastructure and cloud-native systems
• Experience working with large-scale datasets and streaming architectures
• Ability to operate independently in high-ambiguity startup environments

Preferred Experience

Low-Latency & Real-Time Systems

Experience with:

• high-throughput distributed systems,
• event streaming,
• websocket infrastructure,
• real-time market systems,
• low-latency APIs,
• exchange infrastructure,
• or performance-critical backend environments.

Large-Scale Data Infrastructure

Experience with:

• Kafka,
• Pulsar,
• ClickHouse,
• Redis,
• Timescale,
• vector databases,
• OLAP systems,
• data lakes,
• or large-scale event processing architectures.

AI-Native Infrastructure

Experience building systems supporting:

• multimodal AI,
• inference orchestration,
• RAG systems,
• vector retrieval,
• agentic systems,
• or GPU-aware infrastructure.

Consumer Product Engineering

Experience building:

• high-scale consumer applications,
• real-time collaborative systems,
• financial platforms,
• trading systems,
• social/discovery products,
• or event-driven applications.

B2B Platform Infrastructure

Experience designing:

• institutional APIs,
• developer platforms,
• SDKs,
• enterprise integrations,
• authentication/authorization systems,
• and highly reliable external-facing infrastructure.

Technical Stack

Strong candidates will likely have experience with several of the following:

Backend & Systems

• Go
• Rust
• C++
• Python
• Node.js / TypeScript

Infrastructure & Cloud

• Kubernetes
• Docker
• GCP / AWS
• Terraform
• gRPC
• NATS
• Kafka
• Redis

Databases & Data Systems

• Postgres
• ClickHouse
• TimescaleDB
• Elasticsearch
• Vector databases
• OLAP systems

AI / Data Infrastructure

• PyTorch inference systems
• Ray
• LangGraph
• Streaming inference pipelines
• GPU-aware orchestration
• Distributed ML serving systems

What We Look For

• Strong systems intuition
• High engineering rigor
• Deep performance awareness
• Ability to reason about scale, latency, and reliability
• Strong ownership mentality
• Fast iteration velocity
• Comfort operating under ambiguity
• Pragmatic engineering judgment
• Interest in frontier AI-native systems

We care far more about technical depth and systems thinking than pedigree.

Nice-to-Have Backgrounds

• High-frequency trading infrastructure
• Exchange systems
• Real-time analytics platforms
• Quantitative finance infrastructure
• AI infrastructure companies
• Distributed databases
• Large-scale consumer applications
• Autonomous systems infrastructure
• Streaming media systems
• Space/aerospace systems
• Performance-critical robotics infrastructure

Compensation

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity participation
• Opportunity to help architect foundational infrastructure from day one

NYC

To Apply

Send:

• Resume / LinkedIn
• GitHub or technical portfolio
• Representative systems or infrastructure projects
  
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