Ostium Labs develops a decentralized perpetuals trading protocol that lets users trade global market assets directly from a self-custodial wallet.
Ostium is on a simple mission: make it possible for anyone with a digital wallet to trade stocks, commodities, currencies, and crypto with full transparency. No brokers, no freezes, no hidden spreads. We’re replacing the opaque, offshore brokerage model with a transparent, permissionless trading stack built onchain. Every trade, deposit, and withdrawal is verifiable through open, auditable code. We’ve raised $27.9M+ from General Catalyst, Jump, LocalGlobe, Susquehanna (SIG), GSR, Alliance DAO, Soma Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, Meltem Demirors, and others. OVERVIEW Ostium is looking for a mid/senior-level backend engineer to work on ambitious goals and projects. This engineer will work on the following: - Build out our entity service — a new central configuration plane for all our assets, providers, model parameters, and much more. - Work on a new, low-latency, highly reliable pricing system. - Work with quants, infra, data, and backend engineers to build a centralized pricing plane for every part of our system (real dollar value). We are looking to build an extremely dynamic pricing system that will give our users the best possible price at any given moment. This system will determine if we win. We need an extremely ambitious and optimistic engineer who wants to win and is willing to put 100% effort into it. TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS - Strong Golang engineer that understands how to leverage AI effectively in the development process - Deep expertise with schema design, evolution, and iteration - Financial knowledge, experience with trading systems, and understanding of financial concepts - Experience with Postgres, NATs, Red Panda, GRPC, APIs, WebSocket, and other core modern services - Strongly leverages AI in the development process, but with extreme care and validation criteria CHARACTERISTIC REQUIREMENTS Risk Averse — Always looking to minimize paths where things can go dangerously wrong. AI Power Users — Not a vibe coder, someone who leverages AI effectively, validates outputs, and builds guardrails. Solution Oriented — There will be flaws; things will not be perfect. You must be willing to reason, prioritize, and propose paths forward that align with our business goals. Prioritize and Act — Be a leader and take stock of what's needed, what will deliver the most value, and propose your own work and path forward. Humble and Willing to Learn — Be willing to learn from quants, engineers, the ops team, and everyone at this company about everything. We have no room in this company for people stuck in their ways. Winner — This is a team sport, and there is a very real scoreboard. We want people who don't care about scoring the most points. They only care about the team winning and will do whatever it takes. Disagree and Commit — Your voice will be heard and so will all your proposals and plans. But once a decision has been made, whether you agree or not, we expect 100% effort in execution. WHAT YOU WILL WORK ON Entity Service API — This will be our core configuration plane where we will manage assets, mappings, market hours, providers, smart contract parameters, algo parameters, and much more. Entity Service UI — A UI for every user in this company to propose changes, review them, and leave comments. Strong ACL and user management. Pricing System — Assist in our new pricing engine to allow us to dynamically price every incoming transaction. The better prices we can offer, the more liquidity we can attract. Commitment to Equal Opportunity Ostium is committed to creating a culture of inclusion and belonging, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We believe it is our collective responsibility to uphold these values and encourage candidates from all backgrounds to join us in our mission. All qualified applicants will be treated with respect and receive equal consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, uniform service, veteran status, age, or any other protected characteristic per federal, state, or local law. If you are passionate about what you do and want to use your talents to support our mission and values, we’d love to hear from you.