Sr. Software Engineer

Sr. Software Engineer @ Astera Holdings

Location: Remote

Type: Full-Time

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

About Astera Holdings:

Astera Holdings is a quantitative finance firm on a mission to redefine prediction markets—an emerging category of financial markets where people trade on the outcomes of real-world events. Our goal is to transform this space from one driven by speculation into a legitimate, scientific asset class. We are building what we aspire to be the "Renaissance Technologies of prediction markets" and are looking for elite, intellectually curious individuals to join us in engineering this new frontier.

Our company operates on a synergistic, three-pillar structure:

1. BetSmart: Our consumer-facing DaaS application, designed to make smart betting simple and accessible.
2. Astera Capital: Our institutional asset management arm, built to generate absolute, uncorrelated returns.
3. Astera Analytics: Our premier B2B consulting partner, which deploys our core intelligence to solve complex enterprise challenges.

These pillars work in concert to power the Astera Flywheel, our core competitive advantage. Each subsidiary generates unique, proprietary data that is fed back into our central Astera Intelligence Engine, making our models exponentially more powerful over time. Our culture is a "Meritocracy of Minds," built on Radical Intellectual Honesty, a Scientific Approach to Everything, and Lean Intensity.

About the Role:

As a Senior Software Engineer, you are a lead architect and builder of our core technology. This is a senior individual contributor role for a master engineer who is obsessed with solving complex problems in distributed systems, scalability, and performance. You will be a foundational member of the engineering team, taking ownership of critical systems, from the scalable backend of our BetSmart consumer application to the high-performance infrastructure that powers our quantitative research and trading.

This role is for a builder who wants to make a massive impact and solve the hardest technical challenges from first principles. You will work directly with our leadership and quantitative researchers to architect and implement the robust, elegant, and highly scalable systems that will define our success.

What You'll Do:

• Lead System Design and Architecture: Take ownership of major components of our technology stack, leading the design and implementation of scalable, resilient, and performant backend services.
• Build for Scale: Architect and build the core infrastructure for the BetSmart application, ensuring it can handle millions of users with low latency and high availability.
• Write Exceptional Code: Ship high-quality, well-tested, and maintainable code that serves as the standard for engineering excellence at Astera.
• Solve the Hardest Problems: Tackle our most complex technical challenges, whether it's optimizing database performance, designing a real-time data pipeline, or building a new microservice from scratch.
• Mentor and Elevate: Act as a technical leader and mentor for other engineers, elevating the team's capabilities through rigorous code reviews, architectural guidance, and sharing your deep expertise.

What We're Looking For:

• Exceptional Engineering Expertise: A proven track record of designing, building, and scaling complex, distributed systems in a production environment.
• Deep Proficiency in Backend Development: Master-level knowledge of one or more backend languages (e.g., Go, Rust, Python, C++) and frameworks.
• Expertise in System Architecture: A deep understanding of microservices, event-driven architectures, database design (SQL & NoSQL), and caching strategies.
• Cloud and Infrastructure Mastery: Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• A First-Principles Problem Solver: The ability to deconstruct complex challenges and build elegant, efficient solutions from the ground up.
• A Bias for Action and Ownership: A self-starter mentality with a relentless focus on shipping high-quality systems and taking full ownership of your work from concept to production.

Bonus Points If You:

• Have experience in the FinTech or quantitative finance space.
• Have experience with high-throughput data processing systems like Kafka or Flink.
• Have contributed to open-source projects.
• Have experience with low-latency programming or performance tuning.

To Apply:

Please send your application to jonah@astera.holdings with the following: your resume, a link to your GitHub profile, and a short note (or a Loom video) telling us:

1. Why you are the perfect fit for this Senior Software Engineer role.
2. About the most complex or interesting system you have ever designed or built.