Astera Holdings

Compensation

Full Description

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 Ad Astra