Systems Engineer (Contract, Brazil)

About Nexus

Nexus is the engine for verifiable finance — a blockchain designed to natively embed the world’s financial system into one compounding system. Built to support every major financial market on a single global exchange, Nexus unifies infrastructure that has historically been fragmented across chains and intermediaries.

Headquartered in San Francisco with a growing presence in Buenos Aires, Nexus is proud to be a cross-continental team of engineers, cryptographers, and market builders. We’re investing deeply in the Latin American ecosystem — and always looking for world-class talent to join us.

Nexus is backed by leading investors, including Pantera, Lightspeed, Dragonfly, Faction, Blockchain Builders Fund, Alliance, and SVA, and works with more than 100 partners across the global finance and blockchain stack.

Location: Remote

Type: Contract

Duration: 12 months with potential for extension

The Role

We’re hiring Systems Engineers in Latin America to work at the core of Nexus’s execution stack — contributing to the runtime behind our Layer 1 protocol and the high-performance engine that powers decentralized trading.

This is not a typical backend role. You will work on performance-critical systems where microseconds matter, building execution paths that may evolve into core protocol primitives. Your work will directly shape how orders are processed, state transitions are computed, and performance guarantees are achieved across the network.

Whether you're a strong mid-level engineer looking to grow into system ownership, or a senior/principal engineer eager to architect high-throughput distributed systems, this role offers the opportunity to build software that runs at the heart of a global execution layer.

You’ll collaborate closely with protocol, cryptography, and product teams in San Francisco while contributing remotely from Brazil.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement high-performance components in Rust, C++, or Go for Nexus’s DEX engine and protocol runtime.
• Build low-latency pipelines for order execution, event propagation, and state updates.
• Optimize concurrency, scheduling, memory layout, and I/O paths for determinism and throughput.
• Contribute to the evolution of execution abstractions that may be enshrined at the protocol layer.
• Work with protocol engineers to ensure safety, composability, and consensus compatibility.
• Investigate and resolve performance bottlenecks using profiling, tracing, and benchmarking techniques.
• Help define standards for reliability, correctness, and high-assurance distributed execution.
• For senior/principal candidates: Drive system design decisions, shape execution architecture, and mentor others in performance engineering.
  
  

What We’re Looking For

• Strong experience with Rust, C++, Go, or other systems programming languages.
• Understanding of high-performance or distributed systems (e.g., low-latency engines, runtimes, databases, OS-level concurrency).
• Ability to think in terms of execution flows, concurrency models, resource lifecycles, and system invariants.
• Practical experience profiling CPU, memory, and synchronization overhead.
• Comfort working close to runtime constraints where performance, determinism, and resilience are critical.
• Excellent communication skills in Business English (spoken and written).
  
  

Bonus Points For

• Experience building matching engines, databases, compilers, blockchain runtimes, or HPC systems.
• Familiarity with lock-free concurrency, zero-copy data structures, or cache-aware design.
• Exposure to protocol engineering, consensus systems, or transaction ordering.
• Background in correctness-focused engineering (e.g., formal verification, static analysis).
• Open-source contributions to systems-level projects.
  
  

Why Join Us

• Build the execution backbone of a Layer 1 blockchain and next-generation DEX engine.
• Work on systems where your optimizations translate directly into global performance gains.
• Grow from mid-level contributor to system owner — or drive execution architecture as a senior/principal.
• Shape primitives designed to last — correct, performant, and potentially enshrined at the protocol level.
• Join a high-performance engineering culture where ambition and deep technical work are expected.