About the role

What will you do at Axiom (YC W25)?

About Axiom

Axiom is building the future of retail trading. As more opportunities move onchain, our mission is to make discovering and trading assets fast, powerful, and intuitive.

Today, Axiom serves millions of users and facilitates more than $100M in daily trading volume. We are a small, fast-growing team based in Austin, with high ownership, urgency, and an obsession with exceptional products.

About the Role

Set technical direction for Axiom's backend

Build and operate the low-latency APIs, indexers, and real-time pipelines behind the product

Own latency, throughput, and correctness for systems under constant write load

Design schemas and caching across Postgres, Redis, and ClickHouse at high volume

Ship across chains - Solana, BNB, Ethereum, Base, and more

Debug production incidents across services, databases, and chain infrastructure

Improve fleet architecture while keeping systems simple and operable

Raise the engineering bar through strong judgment and mentorship

Minimum Qualifications

Deep TypeScript/Node or Rust experience (we run both)
Excellent programming and debugging fundamentals
Experience building and operating backend services in production
Solid Postgres fundamentals and instincts for query performance
Comfortable working with high ownership in a fast-moving environment

Preferred Qualifications

Low-latency, high-throughput systems where milliseconds are a product requirement
Redis at cluster scale, ClickHouse, or Kafka/Redpanda
Advanced Postgres: indexing, query plans, replication, partitioning, bloat
WebSocket fan-out, streaming, or event-driven architectures
Blockchain indexing or onchain data on Solana or EVM
Owning services in production: deploys, metrics, alerting, and incident response
We encourage you to apply even if you do not meet every qualification.

Compensation

Annual Salary: $320,000 - $465,000 USD

Which skills does this role require?

TypeScriptNode.jsRustEthereumBNBBaseAPI DevelopmentSystem ArchitectureDebuggingBackend EngineerAPIData PipelinesWebSocketsInfrastructureRetail TradingEngineeringSoftware DevelopmentPostgreSQL

Make your next move

Build a shortlist and prepare

Identify the requirements you can demonstrate, then choose examples from your work to discuss with the hiring team.

Build a focused shortlist before you applyCompare role requirements with your experience and give each application a clear reason.
Backend engineering jobsCompare current openings and review what to look for in this role.
Practice explaining your experience in an interviewRehearse your answers before meeting the hiring team.

Review the responsibilities and requirements before adding an opening to your shortlist.