Backend Engineer -Trading Infrastructure

Backend Engineer — Trading Infrastructure

Solayer Labs · Palo Alto (onsite) · Summer Internship 

About Solayer

Solayer Labs builds high-performance infrastructure for real-time finance — including a perpetual DEX and the trading systems behind it. We recently launched a $35M ecosystem fund and are backed by Polychain, Binance Labs / YZi Labs, Hack VC, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

We're a small team solving problems that are genuinely hard: matching engines that have to be fast and correct, market data pipelines measured in microseconds, and risk systems that can't be wrong. If you want to work on systems where performance actually matters — not another CRUD service — this is that.

What you'll work on

This is an engineering role first. The problems are concrete:

• Matching engine and order lifecycle — order book data structures, order routing, cancellations, fills, staying correct under load
• Low-latency market data — ingestion, normalization, and distribution; WebSocket feeds serving thousands of concurrent clients
• Risk and settlement — margin calculation, the liquidation engine, funding rates, position accounting
• Performance engineering — latency budgets, profiling, throughput ceilings, p99 tail work, allocation and cache behavior
• Distributed systems — replication, failover, consistency, state recovery after a crash
• Onchain integration — Solana programs, transaction pipelines, keeping onchain and offchain state in sync

Quant research is a potential opportunity. There's real work adjacent to the systems — market microstructure, funding rate and liquidation modeling, backtesting infrastructure — and as the trading products mature, engineers with the interest and aptitude may have a chance to contribute there as well.

What we're looking for

• High agency and strong motivation. You pick up unfamiliar problems without waiting to be told, learn fast, and push things all the way to done. On a team this small, this matters more to us than any other line on this list.
• You get real leverage out of AI. We expect engineers here to use AI aggressively — for research, prototyping, debugging, and shipping — and we're looking for people who've moved well past autocomplete into using it as a genuine force multiplier.
• Pursuing or recently completed a degree in CS, EE, or a related technical field
• Strong fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networking, concurrency, databases
• Comfortable in at least one systems language (Rust, C++, Go) — or a fast learner who's ready to pick one up
• Evidence that you build things: side projects, open source contributions, hackathons, competitive programming (ICPC, Codeforces), or anything you shipped and maintained
• Based in the Bay Area or willing to relocate

Nice to have (genuinely optional)

None of these are required, and we've hired people with none of them.

• Exposure to low-latency systems, HFT, exchanges, or market data
• Crypto experience: Solana, Rust smart contracts, DeFi protocols, onchain data analysis, running a validator
• Performance work: profiling, lock-free data structures, memory layout, kernel bypass
• A prior internship on an infrastructure, platform, or trading team
• A quantitative bent — probability, statistics, Python data stack — if you want to touch the research side too

We care much more about how you think and what you've built than about which keywords are on your resume.

What you get

• Real ownership from week one. Interns ship to production here. There is no shadow project.
• Direct mentorship from senior engineers and founders — small team, short feedback loops.
• A clear intern → full-time path. We hire our interns.
• Depth. Very few places let a new engineer touch a matching engine, a market data pipeline, and an onchain program in the same summer.
• A team you'll actually want to hang out with. Board game nights and pickup basketball are a standing part of the calendar.

Logistics

• Internship term: June–August 2027, 12 weeks
• Compensation: $25–$70/hour
• Work authorization: U.S. work authorization required. CPT/OPT eligible. Visa sponsorship may be available upon full-time hire.
• Location: Onsite in the Bay Area

How to apply

Apply through Handshake with your resume. Optional but encouraged: a link to a GitHub repo, a project writeup, a paper, or anything else you're proud of and want us to read.

Trading projects get our attention. If you've built anything in this space, lead with it — an exchange connector or market data collector, an execution bot, a low-latency order book implementation, an onchain arbitrage script, an AI agent that researches or generates trading strategies, even a paper-trading experiment that lost money and taught you something. We read these carefully. Nothing demonstrates real interest in trading better than having already tried to build it.

A short note on which of the problems above you'd most want to work on goes a long way.

Solayer Labs is an equal opportunity employer.