Backend Engineer (Pricing, Entity)

About the Role

Ostium is looking for a mid/senior-level backend engineer to work on ambitious goals and projects. We are building 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 ambitious and optimistic engineer who is willing to put 100% effort into it. This is an on-site position based in our New York office.

Responsibilities

• Build out our entity service—a new central configuration plane for all our assets, providers, model parameters, and more.
• Work on a new, low-latency, highly reliable pricing system.
• Collaborate with quants, infra, data, and backend engineers to build a centralized pricing plane for every part of our system (real dollar value).
• Develop the Entity Service API—our core configuration plane for managing assets, mappings, market hours, providers, smart contract parameters, algo parameters, and more.
• Build the Entity Service UI—a tool for every user in the company to propose changes, review them, and leave comments, with strong ACL and user management.
• Assist in developing our new pricing engine to dynamically price every incoming transaction, improving liquidity by offering better prices.

Requirements

• Technical Requirements:
  • Strong Golang engineer with experience leveraging AI effectively in the development process.
  • Deep expertise in 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.
  • Strong ability to leverage AI in development while maintaining extreme care and validation criteria.
• Characteristic Requirements:
  • Risk Averse: Always looking to minimize paths where things can go dangerously wrong.
  • AI Power User: Not a "vibe coder"—someone who leverages AI effectively, validates outputs, and builds guardrails.
  • Solution Oriented: Willing to reason, prioritize, and propose paths forward when flaws or imperfections arise.
  • Prioritize and Act: Be a leader—take stock of what's needed, identify high-value work, and propose your own path forward.
  • Humble and Willing to Learn: Open to learning from quants, engineers, the ops team, and everyone at the company.
  • Winner: Team-focused, with a drive to ensure the team wins, not just individual achievements.
  • Disagree and Commit: Your voice will be heard, but once a decision is made, you execute with 100% effort, regardless of personal agreement.

Work Environment

We have a global team, with core offices in New York and Miami. If you're based in these cities, we expect you to work primarily from the office. Remote employees are hired when it makes sense, but we require travel for key product sprints to collaborate in person. We value an in-person culture for the best collaboration, especially during sprints, but build flexibility into the year (e.g., remote work during holidays). We're looking for teammates who enjoy face-to-face collaboration and are excited to spend regular time together in person.

About Us

Ostium’s mission is to 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 investors including General Catalyst, Jump, LocalGlobe, Susquehanna (SIG), GSR, Alliance DAO, Soma Capital, Balaji Srinivasan, Meltem Demirors, and others.

Our founding team includes Harvard and Bridgewater alumni, along with medalists in International Olympiads (Physics, Biology). We work hard because we care deeply about what we’re building—a meritocracy where we debate hard, disagree and commit, and leverage AI to scale effectively.

Global markets still run on outdated infrastructure: opaque brokers, black-box pricing, and permissioned access. We’re building for a new kind of trader—global, self-directed, cross-asset, and stablecoin-native. Instead of rebuilding liquidity from scratch, we’ve built the legal, operational, and technical infrastructure to connect directly into existing markets and route their liquidity onchain. The result: prime-broker-grade access in the hands of individual traders, with every spread, liquidation, and dollar of collateral verifiable onchain.

Perpetuals are going mainstream, US regulators are opening doors to digital commodity perps, and real-world assets are moving onchain faster than predicted. The window to define this category is open now—and we’re already ahead.