Director of Engineering (Contract, LATAM)

This contract role holds end-to-end ownership of the Nexus Exchange, spanning the matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing and storage, API/CLI/SDK surfaces, oracle, and all underlying infrastructure. The position blends hands-on production coding, primarily in Rust and Go, with org-wide engineering leadership across a distributed, international team.

The successful candidate will set architecture, own roadmaps and resourcing, drive product outcomes, and maintain rigorous standards on correctness, throughput, and tail latency across money-handling systems. Establishing CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, automated testing frameworks, and incident response practices are all within scope, as is mentoring senior engineers and growing tech leads.

• Own architecture across the full Exchange domain while remaining hands-on writing production code in the highest-leverage system components.
• Build and maintain all Exchange sub-components, including matching engine, risk engine, settlement, data indexing, cold storage, API/CLI/SDK, and oracle, on Kubernetes and Terraform infrastructure.
• Lead the engineering organisation, managing timelines, roadmaps, resourcing, and team structure in collaboration with the executive team.
• Drive end-to-end automation of engineering processes, including logging, telemetry, observability, and agentic workflow tooling.
• Set and uphold quality standards for code review, on-call rotations, incident response, and automated testing across end-to-end, property, fuzz, and invariant test suites.
• Mentor senior engineers and tech leads, and own hiring to grow the team.

• 8 or more years building production software, including at least 2 years in an engineering leadership role spanning multiple teams.
• Proven experience with high-throughput, low-latency systems and strong command of concurrent and parallel programming.
• Hands-on fluency in Rust and Go, with working knowledge of Next.js/TypeScript or Node, and GCP.
• Deep familiarity with exchange or trading-system architecture, including matching, risk, settlement correctness, and market data handling.
• Demonstrated ability to establish engineering practices such as CI/CD, observability, and on-call in fast-growing environments.
• Fluent written and spoken English with an async-first working style and meaningful US Pacific timezone overlap.

Nexus is a blockchain platform built to consolidate fragmented financial infrastructure into a single global exchange for verifiable finance. Headquartered in San Francisco with a growing presence in Buenos Aires, the company is backed by Pantera, Lightspeed, Dragonfly, and others, and works with more than 100 partners across the global finance and blockchain ecosystem.