Technical Engineering Manager

TECHNICAL ENGINEERING MANAGER

Technical Engineering Manager for an early-stage digital assets business building a perpetuals and matching-engine product.

Location: Remote-friendly; overlap with US time zones required

Reports to: Founders

Direct reports: None initially; expected to hire and lead 3 to 5 engineers over 12 to 18 months

Type: Full-time

Stage: Early-stage

Organisation Overview

Our client is an early-stage digital assets technology business building a perpetuals and matching-engine product.

The organisation is developing a highly technical trading platform where correctness, reliability, performance and operational resilience are critical. The current environment includes a near-greenfield contractor-built codebase and a TypeScript and Node.js technology stack incorporating matching-engine functionality, Redis, gRPC, fill ingestion and associated infrastructure.

The business is now appointing its first in-house senior engineering hire to take ownership of the technical engineering function, strengthen the underlying platform and establish the foundations from which an internal engineering team can scale.

The Appointment

The Technical Engineering Manager will be a hands-on player-coach responsible for both production engineering and the development of the future engineering organisation.

During the first six to nine months, the majority of the role will remain directly technical. The successful candidate will write and review production code, own backend and infrastructure standards, strengthen the matching and trading path, introduce an effective software development lifecycle and make the existing platform safer and easier for additional engineers to develop.

The appointment will subsequently hire and lead an initial team of 3 to 5 engineers while continuing to maintain a significant individual-contributor workload. This is not a traditional people-management position or architecture-only role. The successful candidate must remain comfortable working directly within the codebase while providing technical leadership, planning, design review and engineering judgement.

Key Responsibilities

·  Design, implement and improve core backend and infrastructure components across the matching and order path, persistence, service boundaries, scalability and system reliability.

·  Own critical correctness properties including atomicity, consistency between book and log, market isolation, crash recovery, durability, idempotency and safe failure behaviour.

·  Write and review production code primarily in TypeScript and JavaScript, using Go, Bash or other supporting technologies where appropriate.

·  Establish the software development lifecycle across specifications, tickets, branching, pull requests, CI, staging, production deployment, schema migrations and GitHub governance.

·  Build and maintain CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, logging, tracing, dashboards, alerts and service-level indicators, while contributing directly to production support and on-call.

·  Lead technical design and work-breakdown sessions, translating broad or ambiguous initiatives into sequenced and sprint-deliverable engineering work.

·  Establish the engineering quality bar through design documentation, architecture decisions, pull-request review, testing standards, pairing, runbooks and technical documentation.

·  Recruit, mentor and lead the initial engineering team across backend, matching-engine and infrastructure disciplines while retaining a meaningful hands-on technical contribution.

Experience and Capability

·  15+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 10 years as a hands-on individual contributor and at least 5 years of genuine people-management experience.

·  Proven experience developing correctness-sensitive backend systems within trading, exchanges, payments, financial markets, digital assets or similarly demanding transactional environments.

·  Strong computer science and distributed-systems foundations across data structures, algorithms, asymptotic analysis, concurrency, parallel execution, locking, consistency, queues, caching and idempotency.

·  Strong backend engineering capability across TypeScript, JavaScript and Node.js, with practical experience of technologies such as gRPC, protobuf, Redis, PostgreSQL and modular or service-based architectures.

·  Strong production engineering experience across containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, GitOps, observability, telemetry, incident response and cloud infrastructure.

·  Experience designing scalable and resilient systems, including relational databases, indexing, replication, partitioning, networking, websockets, backpressure, load balancing and performance-sensitive architectures.

·  Relevant experience within crypto, electronic trading, exchanges, derivatives or perpetuals, ideally including matching engines, order books, snapshot and replay, funding, mark prices, margin, liquidations or settlement.

·  Experience with EVM-based infrastructure, Solidity, HyperEVM, HyperCore, on-chain transaction lifecycles, oracle design or indexing blockchain events into off-chain systems would be advantageous.

Leadership and Stakeholder Context.

The Technical Engineering Manager will report directly to the Founders and will initially operate without direct reports. The role is expected to hire and lead an engineering team of 3 to 5 people over the following 12 to 18 months, with likely capability spanning backend engineering, matching-engine development and infrastructure or SRE.

The successful candidate will need to combine strong technical judgement with pragmatic leadership. This includes converting broad initiatives into achievable engineering programmes, making appropriate scope decisions, building consensus around technical designs and knowing when a proposed change should be blocked on grounds of correctness, performance or incomplete requirements.

The environment is deliberately lean. Engineering process must enable a small team to ship safely rather than introduce unnecessary bureaucracy, and the successful candidate will be expected to improve and take ownership of the existing platform rather than pursue an immediate wholesale rewrite.

RecruitBlock

RecruitBlock specialises in recruitment and executive search across crypto, Web3 and digital assets, connecting high-calibre professionals with organisations shaping the future of financial services and the digital economy.

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