Senior / Lead Rails Engineer

Company Background

Parallel Capital is an algorithmic, high frequency proprietary trading firm that specializes in providing liquidity within the cryptocurrency markets.

We’re a major though under-the-radar player in the cryptocurrency market making ecosystem, founded by industry veterans from both Wall Street and Silicon Valley in a melding of finance and tech. With over 35+ years of combined experience, we profitably trade tens of billions per month, outperforming much larger and better funded teams, and we are expanding rapidly.

To put this in context: we trade 1% of the entire crypto industry's volume daily. If we were a retail exchange (think Coinbase or Binance), we would be ranked between #5-8 on any given day in total trading volume.

We value constant learning, continuous improvement, fast iteration, and relentless resourcefulness. We focus on results, not effort. We embrace the sharing of ideas with an open mind and engage in healthy debate to evaluate them from first principles.

Role and Responsibilities

We’re seeking an experienced Senior Ruby on Rails Engineer to join the team to help design, architect, and build out a new totally greenfield OTC product which includes a REST API for customers to place trading orders alongside a dashboard for displaying account information including balances, historical orders/trades, and deposits/withdrawals.

You’ll be responsible for helping make architectural and UI decisions on the API platform and user facing dashboard alongside the implementation of functionality for those two systems.

We use Tailwind CSS as our frontend framework and do not use React or any fancy frontend Javascript frameworks at the moment. We may use Vue.js for realtime data updates in the future.

No prior cryptocurrency or finance knowledge is required, as we are happy to provide education and training in those areas but a strong engineering background is absolutely essential for success in this role and an interest in these fields is highly recommended.

Expectations

We deeply believe in an iterative process when building technology and as a result we expect a tight feedback loop - frequent communication, asking questions when there are any uncertainties, pointing out tradeoffs to be made, and front footing anything unexpected are all strongly encouraged and highly valued.

The ideal candidate:

• Collaborates effectively with trading and engineering team members to define and refine technical requirements.

• Has good taste in engineering choices, explains and makes wise tradeoffs to balance pragmatism in achieving business requirements with adhering to technical best practices.

• Delivers clean, high quality, easily readable and maintainable code with corresponding documentation and test cases that elegantly meets the business requirements at hand.

• Prefers simplicity and likes to take a lean and iterative approach to solving problems.

• Thrives in a culture of passionate learning and teaching.

• Loves to reflect on challenges and improve process and tooling iteratively.

• Cares about solving big, systemic problems. You look beyond the surface to identify and understand root causes and seek to resolve those instead of only addressing the symptoms.

• Exhibits strong attention to detail and sweats the small things, knowing that they compound to contribute to a more holistic experience by all stakeholders.

• Understands the importance of good documentation and is proactive and consistent about recording clear and useful information as well as making it readily available to other team members and external consumers.

Qualifications

Requirements

5+ years of Ruby on Rails experience, 7+ years of relevant web development experience. Should have strong familiarity with the Ruby ecosystem and understand which gems are “industry standard” as well as their idiosyncrasies.

3+ years of experience designing, implementing, and consuming REST APIs, including authentication, authorization, and rate limiting.

Intimate familiarity with Git and GitHub best practices.

Solid grasp of the HTTP standard and RESTful design.

Strong expertise in PostgreSQL, particularly around query optimization and performance tuning.

Deep understanding of best practices and principles behind web application security.

Advanced knowledge and firsthand experience building production web applications at scale, including background jobs, 

Automated testing, including both unit and integration tests.

Proven track record of teamwork and delivering outstanding results.

Fluent written and verbal English language skills.

Nice to Haves

Bachelor's degree in CS or related, firm understanding of data structures and algorithms.

Experience working with low latency / high traffic / high throughput web applications and APIs.

Experience with high availability systems, including zero downtime deployments, minimal downtime database maintenance, database clustering/replicas, caching and cache invalidation.

Experience with:

• Double entry accounting systems

• Heroku

• Redis

• Python

• Websockets

• Tailwind CSS Framework

Preferred Time Zone

UTC +8 (Hong Kong) +/- 4 hours

Benefits

Fully remote work environment.

We strongly believe in professional development and are supportive in ensuring personal and professional growth. You’ll be joining a small team and get to work directly with the founders. https://github.com/hanchang/manager-readme