Backend Engineer (Pricing, Entity)

Department: Engineering

Location: New York City

Employment Type: FullTime

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.

About the Role

Ostium is looking for a mid/senior-level backend engineer to work on ambitious goals and projects. 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.

This is an on-site position based in our New York office.

What You'll Do

• 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).

• 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.

Who You Are

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.

Where We Work

We have a global team, with our core offices in New York and Miami. If you're based in those city, we expect you'll generally be working from the office. We also hire remote employees when it makes sense, and in those cases, we expect you'll travel in for key product sprints so we can build together in person. We're intentionally building an in-person culture because the best collaboration happens face-to-face, especially during those sprints.

That said, we build flexibility into the year: many team members work remotely while visiting family over the holidays.

Ultimately, we're looking for people who value an in-person culture. Wherever you're based, we want teammates who enjoy collaborating face-to-face and are excited to spend regular time together in person.

How We Work

Our founding team includes Harvard and Bridgewater alumni, along with medalists in International Olympiads (Physics, Biology). We're here to win, which means shipping fast and staying obsessed with what our traders actually need. We work hard, not for optics, but because we care deeply about what we're building.

We're a meritocracy, not a democracy. We debate hard, but once a call is made we disagree and commit, then row together. We also believe being AI-native is one of the only ways to scale properly. Our best operators and engineers know how to leverage AI without ever surrendering their judgment to it. Lead and hone your own intuition, but leverage the machine to scale your efforts.

We know the cost of the old way firsthand. We started Ostium in a hacker house at Harvard after an offshore broker froze our accounts and kept our deposits. If you can't verify it, you don't own it. That conviction is now infrastructure.

Building the neo-broker layer takes range: markets, pricing, risk, engineering, design, and operations. If that's you, there's no second best.

More About Us

Global markets still run on infrastructure built decades ago: opaque brokers, black-box pricing, permissioned and geography-gated access. A new kind of trader — global, self-directed, cross-asset, stablecoin-native — has outgrown all of it, and that trader is who we're building for.

Most of the industry is trying to rebuild liquidity onchain from scratch. We took a different view: the world's deepest markets already hold the liquidity traders want. What's broken is access. So we built the hard part — the legal, operational, and technical infrastructure to connect directly into those markets and route their liquidity onchain, to anyone with a wallet. Prime-broker-grade access in the hands of the individual trader, with every spread, liquidation, and dollar of collateral verifiable onchain.

Perpetuals just went mainstream. US regulators have opened the door to digital commodity perps, and real-world assets are moving onchain faster than anyone predicted. The window to define this category is open now — and we're already ahead in it.

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.