Senior Backend Engineer
Senior Backend Engineer at Pluto — New York, NY, US
- Company: Pluto
- Location: New York, NY, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 250000–300000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
About Pluto
Pluto is building the financial infrastructure for superintelligence. Compute is the bottleneck of the AI economy, but it is extremely opaque, volatile, and difficult to finance. Pluto is the first exchange with a materially complete designation from the CFTC to make compute a liquid, tradable asset class.
This is a chance to build the defining financial asset class of AI from the ground-up.
Responsibilities
Design, build, and maintain backend systems powering a regulated exchange and its surrounding infrastructure
Own services end-to-end: architecture, implementation, deployment, and production reliability
Work directly with founders and early customers to translate ambiguous requirements into robust systems
Mentor engineers through code reviews, system design discussions, and hands-on collaboration
Contribute to core technical decisions across the stack and shape the long-term architecture
Qualifications
Required
5+ years of experience building and operating backend systems in production
Strong systems design skills (distributed systems, APIs, data modeling, reliability)
Experience owning services end-to-end in a production environment
Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate other engineers
Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous startup environment
Strong communication skills (written and verbal)
Willingness to work in-office 5 days/week in NYC
Preferred
Experience with financial systems and trading infrastructure, ideally through HFT
Expert level programming in C++ or Go
Familiarity with low-latency systems, event-driven architectures, or real-time data pipelines
Interest in markets, infrastructure, or building new asset classes
What We’re Looking For
Engineers who take ownership and ship end-to-end, not just write code
Strong product intuition
High bar for correctness and reliability
People who want to work closely with users and shape a new market
Compensation
Competitive salary + meaningful equity in the company that commoditizes intelligence.