Backend Engineer

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: multimodal agent architectures 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: distributed systems AI‑native applications 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: streaming infrastructure distributed event systems multimodal inference pipelines production reliability You should be capable of operating across: systems architecture infrastructure performance optimization 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 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 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 High‑throughput distributed systems Event streaming Real‑time market systems Exchange infrastructure Performance‑critical backend environments Experience with: Kafka Pulsar ClickHouse Redis Timescale OLAP systems AI‑Native Infrastructure Inference orchestration RAG systems Agentic systems GPU‑aware infrastructure Consumer Product Engineering High‑scale consumer applications Trading systems Social/discovery products Event‑driven applications B2B Platform Infrastructure Institutional APIs SDKs Enterprise integrations Highly reliable external‑facing infrastructure Technical Stack Go Rust C++ Python Node.js/TypeScript Infrastructure & Cloud Docker GCP / AWS Terraform gRPC NATS Kafka Redis Databases & Data Systems ClickHouse TimescaleDB Elasticsearch 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 Reasoning about scale, latency, and reliability Ownership mentality 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 Distributed databases Large‑scale consumer applications Autonomous systems infrastructure Streaming media systems Space/aerospace systems Performance‑critical robotics infrastructure Compensation Meaningful equity participation Opportunity to help architect foundational infrastructure from day one Location NYC To Apply Resume / LinkedIn GitHub or technical portfolio Representative systems or infrastructure projects Ad Astra #J-18808-Ljbffr