Systems Engineer

About Axiom

Axiom is building the future of retail trading. As more opportunities move onchain, our mission is to make discovering and trading assets fast, powerful, and intuitive.

Today, Axiom serves millions of users and facilitates more than $100M in daily trading volume. We are a small, fast-growing team based in Austin, with high ownership, urgency, and an obsession with exceptional products.

About the Role

• Act as one of the team’s Systems experts and share your specialist skills with the rest of the team; these skills include debugging live systems in production, tuning database configurations, host networking, et cetera

• Automate our own work, because it makes us faster and more reliable (and we think it's fun)

• Diagnose and resolve production issues in real time, often under time pressure

• Carry out scheduled changes to the platform, like upgrades, migrations, capacity changes, and rollouts, planned meticulously and executed carefully

• Care deeply about correctness and efficiency, and want to take ownership of infrastructure

Minimum Qualifications

• Very strong programming ability, especially in low-level languages like Rust, C and C++

  • although this is an “Infrastructure” job posting, the person filling the role will be expected to help support the “low level programming” side of our infrastructure

• Some experience with SQL databases

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong experience in Rust, including reasoning through complex multithreaded and concurrent code

• Strong knowledge of PostgreSQL, including:

  • Behavior under high-volume workloads, such as vacuuming, row locking, dead tuples, and index maintenance
  • Designing and optimizing indexes for specific query patterns
  • Understanding tradeoffs between different schema designs
  • Planning and executing complex production data migrations with minimal downtime
  • Investigating and troubleshooting database performance issues in real time

• Strong understanding of network protocols with an ability to reason across the full networking stack; and websockets are central to our infrastructure, and so it’s extremely important to know exactly what can go wrong at every layer in the stack and how to combat it

• Strong system-design judgment with the ability to weigh tradeoffs, including knowing when simplicity and lower maintenance burden are more valuable than following conventional best practices

• Comfortable forming strong opinions on both high- and low-level technical decisions, while being willing to debate and reconsider them

• Comfortable working from the Linux command line, including troubleshooting system health, processes, logs, and other runtime issues

• A practical problem solver who uses code to solve problems and cares deeply about robust, maintainable software engineering

Compensation

Annual Salary: $320,000 - $465,000 USD