Director of Engineering (USA)

About the role

Nexus is the engine for verifiable finance — a blockchain designed to natively embed the world’s financial system into one compounding system. Built to support every major financial market on a single global exchange, Nexus unifies infrastructure that has historically been fragmented across chains and intermediaries. Headquartered in San Francisco with a growing presence in Buenos Aires, Nexus is proud to be a cross-continental team of engineers, cryptographers, and market builders. We’re investing deeply in the Latin American ecosystem — and always looking for world-class talent to join us.

What You’ll Do

• Own architecture across the Exchange domain — and stay hands-on, writing production code in the highest-leverage parts of the system.
• Build the full Exchange and all its sub-components: matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing, cold data storage, API / CLI / SDK, oracle, and the underlying infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform).
• Lead the engineering org — senior engineers plus pods — managing timelines, roadmaps, and resourcing.
• Drive product and customer outcomes, business-minded first; drive urgency and high-frequency iteration.
• Make the org the most productive and efficient it can be.
• Own end-to-end automation of engineering processes: agent infrastructure, logging, telemetry, observability — “closing the loop” with self-improvement loops and maximizing organizational context for agentic execution.
• Design team structures and incentives with the CEO and exec team.
• Manage an international, distributed workforce.
• Drive quality infrastructure — telemetry, observability, and thorough automated testing (e2e, property, fuzz, invariants) — and set the bar for code review, on-call, and incident response, with particular rigor on money-handling paths. Correctness and performance should be continuously provable, not assumed.
• Grow ICs and tech leads.
• Communicate via design docs, RFCs, and post-mortems.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years building production software, including 2+ years in an engineering leadership capacity (tech lead / staff / principal / architect across multiple teams).
• Experience leading engineering orgs is important.
• Proven high-throughput, low-latency systems experience and strong command of concurrent/parallel systems.
• Deep hands-on stack fluency: Rust, Go, Next.js/TS or Node, GCP.
• Architecture chops with sound correctness / latency / throughput / operability trade-offs.
• Business-minded and outcome-driven.
• Resilient and logical — clear-headed under pressure, reasons from first principles.
• AI-forward: excited to use the latest AI tools and to push automation across the org.
• Has mentored senior engineers and grown tech leads.
• Fluent written and spoken English; async-first with meaningful US Pacific overlap (naturally strong for a U.S.-based hire).
• Exchange-specific: deep exchange / trading-systems or comparable transaction-processing architecture; matching / risk / settlement correctness; market data (indexing, cold storage); API / SDK / CLI surfaces; oracle design.
• Bonus points: Experience with exchanges / trading systems; Standing up engineering practices (CI/CD, observability, on-call) in a fast-growing org; Building automation / internal dev platforms / agentic workflow tooling; Founding or early engineer at a high-velocity startup; Open-source in Rust / Go / systems.

Our stack

• Backend & systems: Rust, Go.
• Web & product surfaces: Next.js / TypeScript.
• Infrastructure: Google Cloud (GCE/GCP), containerized services, modern CI/CD, Terraform/Pulumi, Prometheus/Grafana.