Job Description
Joyride is building the first dedicated 0DTE options exchange to provide better leverage for crypto traders. Derivatives present the single largest opportunity to bring traditional finance on-chain with over $3.5 trillion dollars of notional volume traded in the U.S. every day. We are developing a world-class exchange using a hybrid architecture: a central limit order book (CLOB) for low latency execution coupled with a blockchain for transparent, non-custodial settlement.
## **The Team**
You will be joining a founding team with a proven track record of building successful companies on-chain and off. Joyride’s team includes the founders and early contributors of Origin Protocol, where we’ve been building on Ethereum since 2017 and have scaled products to nine-figure TVL. In addition to being early advisors to Solana, two of Joyride’s cofounders have built and worked for multiple venture-backed companies that have been acquired by Google, Yahoo, and Walmart.
## **The Challenge**
0DTE options have massive “Gamma risk”—prices move violently as expiration approaches. This presents a unique challenge for an exchange to operate safely.
\- **Balancing Solvency & Capital Efficiency**: Our portfolio margin engine must ensure that traders can always meet the obligations to their counterparties while minimizing the amount of collateral they’re required to post.
\- **Execution Speed**: To efficiently provide liquidity and avoid toxic flow, market makers need to update orders in milliseconds. Even the fastest blockchains today are too slow.
\- **Trust & Verifiability**: Traders demand self-custody and transparency. They won’t deposit funds into a black box they don’t control.
\- **Availability**: Global capital markets never sleep. Our exchange must be dependable and reliable, enabling traders to execute orders and withdrawals 24/7.
As our Founding Principal Engineer, your mandate will be to solve this difficult challenge. You will architect a hybrid exchange engine that matches orders off-chain at the speed of light but settles them on-chain with cryptographic proof validity.
## What you will build:
\- **The Trusted Matching Engine**: Architect a high-frequency Central Limit Order Book (CLOB). It must handle massive throughput without the latency drag of a blockchain while maintaining verifiability.
\- **The Trust Bridge**: Design the cryptographic system that proves to the blockchain that the off-chain match was valid. We must ensure that the exchange operators cannot front-run or alter the order book.
\- **Atomic Settlement**: Write the programs that handle the movement of collateral based on the proofs generated by your off-chain engine.
\- **Risk & Liquidation**: Build a real-time risk engine capable of liquidating 0DTE positions instantly to protect the protocol from bad debt, even during high network congestion.
## Who you are:
\- **High-Performance Systems Expert**: You understand exactly how your code maps to hardware. You prioritize memory layouts, lock-free data structures, and concurrency patterns to squeeze every cycle out of the CPU.
\- **Architectural Polymath**: You are comfortable traversing the gap between high-performance cloud infrastructure and trustless state machines.
\- **Security Minded**: You think like an adversary. When you see a “hybrid” architecture, your first thought is “How do I break the link between the server and the chain?”
## Requirements:
\- 5+ years of backend systems engineering (Rust, C++, or Go)
\- Deep proficiency with Rust
\- Familiarity with Solana and EVM development
\- Knowledge of event-driven architectures and asynchronous programming
\- Experience designing hybrid architecture
\- Strong grasp of applied cryptography
## Bonus:
\- Experience building trading systems (matching engines, risk management)
\- Background in high-frequency trading or financial engineering
\- Previous work on a centralized exchange or CLOB DEX
## What we offer:
\- Competitive salary and upside
\- Remote work flexibility
\- Autonomy to solve challenging problems
\- Fast-paced environment
\- Unlimited growth potential
\- Support for open-source contributions