Joyride Labs Jobs

Joyride is building the first dedicated 0DTE options exchange to provide better leverage for crypto traders. Derivatives present the single largest opportunity to bring traditional finance on-chain with over $3.5 trillion dollars of notional volume traded in the U.S. every day. We are developing a world-class exchange using a hybrid architecture: a central limit order book (CLOB) for low latency execution coupled with a blockchain for transparent, non-custodial settlement.

The Team

You will be joining a founding team with a proven track record of building successful companies on-chain and off. Joyride’s team includes the founders and early contributors of Origin Protocol, where we’ve been building on Ethereum since 2017 and have scaled products to nine-figure TVL. In addition to being early advisors to Solana, two of Joyride’s cofounders have built and worked for multiple venture-backed companies that have been acquired by Google, Yahoo, and Walmart.

The Challenge

0DTE options have massive “Gamma risk”—prices move violently as expiration approaches. This presents a unique challenge for an exchange to operate safely.

- Balancing Solvency & Capital Efficiency: Our portfolio margin engine must ensure that traders can always meet the obligations to their counterparties while minimizing the amount of collateral they’re required to post.

- Execution Speed: To efficiently provide liquidity and avoid toxic flow, market makers need to update orders in milliseconds. Even the fastest blockchains today are too slow.

- Trust & Verifiability: Traders demand self-custody and transparency. They won’t deposit funds into a black box they don’t control.

- Availability: Global capital markets never sleep. Our exchange must be dependable and reliable, enabling traders to execute orders and withdrawals 24/7.

As our Founding Principal Engineer, your mandate will be to solve this difficult challenge. You will architect a hybrid exchange engine that matches orders off-chain at the speed of light but settles them on-chain with cryptographic proof validity.

What you will build:

- The Trusted Matching Engine: Architect a high-frequency Central Limit Order Book (CLOB). It must handle massive throughput without the latency drag of a blockchain while maintaining verifiability.

- The Trust Bridge: Design the cryptographic system that proves to the blockchain that the off-chain match was valid. We must ensure that the exchange operators cannot front-run or alter the order book.

- Atomic Settlement: Write the programs that handle the movement of collateral based on the proofs generated by your off-chain engine.

- Risk & Liquidation: Build a real-time risk engine capable of liquidating 0DTE positions instantly to protect the protocol from bad debt, even during high network congestion.

Who you are:

- High-Performance Systems Expert: You understand exactly how your code maps to hardware. You prioritize memory layouts, lock-free data structures, and concurrency patterns to squeeze every cycle out of the CPU.

- Architectural Polymath: You are comfortable traversing the gap between high-performance cloud infrastructure and trustless state machines.

- Security Minded: You think like an adversary. When you see a “hybrid” architecture, your first thought is “How do I break the link between the server and the chain?”

Requirements:

- 5+ years of backend systems engineering (Rust, C++, or Go)

- Deep proficiency with Rust

- Familiarity with Solana and EVM development

- Knowledge of event-driven architectures and asynchronous programming

- Experience designing hybrid architecture

- Strong grasp of applied cryptography

Bonus:

- Experience building trading systems (matching engines, risk management)

- Background in high-frequency trading or financial engineering

- Previous work on a centralized exchange or CLOB DEX

What we offer:

- Competitive salary and upside

- Remote work flexibility

- Autonomy to solve challenging problems

- Fast-paced environment

- Unlimited growth potential

- Support for open-source contributions