Backend Engineer

Company Overview

hermeneutic research is a best-in-class proprietary trading firm. 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.