Backend Engineer

QFEX

QFEX

Software Engineering

London, UK

USD 100k-150k / year + Equity

Posted on Apr 2, 2026

QFEX

24/7 Global Stock Exchange

Backend Engineer

$100K - $150K0.10% - 0.25%London, England, GB
Job type
Full-time
Role
Engineering, Backend
Experience
3+ years
Visa
US citizenship/visa not required
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Annanay Kapila
Founder
Annanay Kapila
Founder

About the role

Backend Engineer


How Markets Should Be

Traditional financial markets are broken. We are fixing them.

QFEX is the first perpetual futures exchange to allow 24/7, high leverage on traditional financial assets.

Our vision: this kind of exchange will replace the entire $100bn TradFi exchange, clearing and brokerage industry

Our mission: make QFEX that exchange.

We were founded by Cambridge Maths duo Annanay Kapila and Joshua Wharton, who previously worked at Tower Research Capital and Citadel, respectively. The team also includes former staff from Jump, Barclays, and more.

QFEX raised $10m from a group of investors including General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners and Paul Graham.

What You’ll Do

Reliability & performance
Design fault-tolerant, low-latency, always-available services; write load tests and chaos suites; tune until p99 is boring.

Testing
Set up and carry out automated test suites including CI/CD and minimize technical debt.

Technical direction
Evaluate tools, set coding standards, and guide architectural decisions as we scale.

Culture & hiring
Share and receive new knowledge and experiences, set impeccable cultural standards, and help interview the next engineers.

What You’ll Need

  • A STEM degree from a University that is highly ranked in your home country (at the level of Oxbridge/ Imperial in the UK, HYMPS in the US, or a top IIT in India).
  • Experience with a high-performance language like Rust, C or C++.
  • 3+ years building and working on real-time production Exchanges or HFT Systems.
  • The desire to create and impose a responsible culture of tests, metrics, and graceful degradation.
  • Impeccable levels of trust in yourself and others, including the ability to make decisions in minutes, not days.

Bonus points

  • Fintech, exchange, or low-latency experience.
  • Experience with a Python and common data science libraries like pandas and numpy.
  • Deep Kubernetes or infrastructure-as-code experience.

Benefits

  • Lunch allowance and regular company events.
  • The ability to grow alongside some of the best minds in fintech, as well as set standards and culture.
  • 25 days holiday + bank holidays.

About the interview

  1. 2x Founder call (30 min) – learn about our vision, share your story.
  2. On-site deep dive (2-3 hours) – verbal questions and pair programming, meet the team.
  3. Offer – we decide fast (usually within 24 h).

About QFEX

QFEX is the 24/7 exchange for traditional financial markets.

We let you trade US equities, commodities and FX pairs with (or without) leverages of up to 100x. On QFEX, UX comes first: brokerless market access, seamless integration with traditional payment rails, and ultra-efficient Perpetual Futures offered over all asset classes. Trading has never been simpler, cheaper or fairer than with QFEX.

Founded by Quants and Engineers from Citadel & Tower Research who saw an opportunity to make markets how they always should have been, QFEX will eventually replace the entire $100 billion exchange and clearing industry.