Founding Principal Engineer

About Joyride Labs, Inc.

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