Director of Engineering (USA)

Nexus is the engine for verifiable finance, a blockchain designed to unify financial markets on a global exchange. The Director of Engineering will own the engineering of the Nexus Exchange, leading the architecture and management of the engineering organization while driving product and business outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• 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