Systems Engineer

OneChronos is building the bazaar for agentic systems. We're starting in capital markets, where our matching markets routinely account for more than 1% of notional U.S. equity market volume. By bringing together auction theory, distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and deep market structure expertise, we help humans and agentic systems transact more efficiently, improve how value is allocated, and, ultimately, increase global GDP.

We're looking for a Systems Engineer to join the team building and evolving our trading infrastructure. You'll bring strong systems engineering fundamentals and hands-on experience in equities trading technology to a platform operating at significant scale. You'll work on the distributed systems at the core of our matching markets, improving performance, reliability, and scalability while helping us evolve the platform as our business grows.

This is a systems programming role for someone who understands the demands of electronic trading, thinks carefully about correctness, obsesses over performance, and finds genuine satisfaction in code that does exactly what it's supposed to do, reliably, at scale, under pressure.

If you're the kind of engineer who reads papers for fun, has opinions about memory allocators, and wants to understand why the system is designed the way it is before you start changing it, we'd like to talk.

What You'll Do

Your work will span the full lifecycle of our trading platform, with a focus on building, optimizing, and evolving the systems at its core. Concretely:

• Get deeply familiar with our existing matching platform, its architecture, execution model, and order and data workflows, applying your experience with trading systems to help evolve and optimize it
• Design, build, and optimize high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems at the core of our trading infrastructure
• Own the performance and correctness of order and data workflows end to end, including the parts that get interesting at 3am
• Contribute to periodic auction execution logic across products, where the stakes are real and the edge cases are genuinely novel
• Improve system reliability, fault tolerance, and observability across a production environment that processes billions of dollars of transactions daily
• Work across the stack when needed, including infrastructure, DevOps, and the occasional deep-dive into why this one thing is slower than it should be
• Collaborate with a technically rigorous team that will push your thinking and expect you to push back

Who You Are

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in trading technology, with meaningful time spent building and supporting production systems that had real consequences when they misbehaved
• Hands-on experience with equities trading technology, with a solid understanding of market structure, order lifecycles, and electronic trading workflows
• Proficient in a systems-level language, Rust, C++, or Java. Rust experience is a plus, but a strong C++ or Java engineer who's curious about Rust will fit right in here
• A polyglot by instinct: you pick up new languages and paradigms because the problem demands it, not because someone told you to
• Deeply detail-oriented, caring about correctness the way other people care about test coverage metrics, except you actually mean it
• Passionate about low-latency computing, memory management, and the satisfaction of shaving microseconds off something that matters
• Comfortable with large-scale data pipelines and event-driven architectures, having built them, debugged them, and accumulated the scars to prove it
• Energized by understanding complex existing systems before changing them, with the judgment to distinguish between what should be extended, what should be adapted, and what should be rebuilt
• Experienced with CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment practices that let teams move fast without leaving chaos in their wake
• The kind of person who asks "why does this work?" not just "does this work?" and who writes code meant to be read by the next person, not just executed by the machine
• High emotional floor: you can disagree well, give and receive direct feedback, and still grab lunch with the person you just argued with about memory layout