Lead Engineer, Trading Platform Engineering

CoinDesk is the most trusted media events indices and data company for the global crypto economy. Since 2013 CoinDesk Media has led the story of the future of money and investing illuminating the transformation in society and culture that comes with it. Our award-winning team of journalists delivers news and unparalleled insights that bring transparency comprehension and context. CoinDesk Events gathers the global crypto blockchain and Web3 communities at annual events such as Consensus the worlds largest and longest-running crypto festival. CoinDesk Indices offers expertise in digital asset indices data and research to educate and empower investors. For more information on CoinDesk media and events please visit and for breaking headlines data and indices visit

In November 2023 CoinDesk was acquired by the Bullish group owner of Bullish a regulated digital assets exchange. For more information on Bullish please visit . CoinDesk operates as an independent subsidiary with an editorial committee to protect journalistic independence.

Reports to:

Engineering Organization & Culture

At Bullish we are engineering the institutional standard for the digital asset industry. Our mission is to build a platform where security and compliance are the foundational core requiring a commitment to technical excellence that goes beyond simply delivering code. We operate as a global engineering organization setting a high bar in a demanding environment for those driven to do the best work of their careers alongside world-class peers.

We value engineers who treat development as a craft and own the outcome from concept to deployment. You will be expected to navigate the unknown bring structure to ambiguity and help shape the frameworks and processes that drive our global teams forward. We refuse to compromise on quality and seek problem solvers who thrive on high-impact technical challenges.

The Team: Trading Platform Engineering

The Trading Platform Engineering team is responsible for designing and optimizing the high-performance mission-critical foundation that powers our trading activities. Operating at the intersection of software and hardware the team builds low-latency systems that demand expert-level proficiency in Linux kernel internals networking pipelines and distributed systems architecture. The team focuses on architectural excellence reliability determinism and the relentless elimination of tail latency.

What Youll Do

• High-Performance Service Development: Design build and optimize high-performance systems using C and Java.

• Kernel & User Space Engineering: Engineer performance-critical components across user space and kernel interfaces focusing on memory scheduling I/O and networking paths.

• Advanced Networking: Develop and tune networking pipelines (multicast/unicast UDP and TCP) and implement kernel-bypass or fast-path networking (e.g. DPDK XDP).

• Kernel Optimization: Interact with and optimize Linux kernel subsystems including memory management schedulers device drivers and filesystems (VFS).

• Latency & Determinism: Optimize systems for deterministic latency through CPU isolation thread pinning NUMA locality cache awareness and lock contention reduction.

• Distributed Systems: Apply distributed systems patterns such as sequencer (virtual synchrony) for total ordering and consistency.

• Profiling & Debugging: Use tools like perf strace eBPF and flame graphs to identify and eliminate system bottlenecks.

• Operational Excellence: Collaborate cross-functionally to deliver robust production systems with clear SLOs reproducible performance tests and actionable runbooks.

What Youll Bring

• Language Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in Java

• Linux Internals: Deep understanding of Linux kernel internals including memory management driver models and scheduler tuning.

• Low-Latency Expertise: Practical experience in end-to-end latency optimization jitter reduction and techniques like lock-free or wait-free programming.

• Networking Depth: Experience with socket options buffer sizing epoll iouring RSS and NIC queue configuration.

• Distributed Systems Knowledge: Understanding of sequencer-based total order broadcast partial order broadcast and the tradeoffs between latency throughput and availability.

• Concurrency & Systems: Solid understanding of concurrency synchronization primitives and memory models.

• Analytical Mindset: A focus on measurement over assumption using benchmarks and profiles to drive decisions and communicate complex tradeoffs.

• Collaborative Craftsmanship: Commitment to high code quality through rigorous reviews mentoring and clear documentation.

Nice To Haves

• Trading Infrastructure: Experience in financial markets (e.g. market data order routing or FIX/exchange-native protocols).

• Time Synchronization: Familiarity with PTP or other high-precision time synchronization for low-latency environments.

• Observability: Experience using eBPF and tracing for observability in production.

• Hardware Interfacing: Knowledge of RDMA NIC offloads (TSO LRO) or experience maintaining kernel modules and device drivers.

• JVM Tuning: Experience with low-latency JVM practices and deterministic GC tuning for Java-based systems.

• Advanced Benchmarking: Deep knowledge of benchmarking methodology including workload design and variance analysis.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

In an effort to attract retain develop and promote the most qualified individuals CoinDesk is committed to treating all applicants and employees in a nondiscriminatory manner with respect to the terms and conditions of employment without regard to race color religion or belief sex national or ethnic origin ancestry age marital status sexual orientation gender identity veteran status/service physical or mental disability or any other classification protected by applicable law. This mandate governs all aspects of employment including recruitment selection promotion training education social and recreation programs compensation discipline termination and access to benefits.

ACCOMMODATION

CoinDesk is also committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the application process please send an e-mail to and let us know the nature of your request.