Vice President, Trading & Derivatives

The Opportunity

Cronos Labs is building the consumer trading app for the next generation of retail traders — a mobile-first platform where users can trade tokenized stocks, crypto perpetuals, spot markets, and prediction markets within a single unified balance and margin system.

At the core of this platform is a high-performance trading venue. We are building a hybrid CLOB + RFQ execution system alongside a full perpetuals and risk engine. This role is about engineering that system end-to-end: the matching engine, perpetuals core, margin and risk framework, and liquidation infrastructure.

About the role 

This is a VP Engineer role — individual contributors whose impact is measured through the systems they build. The VP title reflects the scope and criticality of this work, not organisational authority. We are looking for engineers with deep, first-hand experience shipping financial trading systems in production. The nuances of a well-built CLOB or perpetuals engine are learned through operating them — through real load, real edge cases, and the discipline of building systems where correctness is non-negotiable.

The VP title reflects the scope and criticality of this work, not organisational authority. This is a pure engineering role with no direct reports — the right fit is someone who measures their impact through the systems they build, not the headcount they manage.

Why This Role Matters

The trading systems we are building sit at the intersection of performance and precision. Matching engines must handle sustained high throughput without compromising order-book correctness. Perpetuals engines carry continuous position and margin state that must remain accurate under concurrent updates. Liquidation and risk systems must be exhaustively validated before users' capital is ever at risk.

These are domains where production experience is the most valuable asset. We need engineers who have operated these systems at scale, understand where the failure modes hide, and know how to build the guardrails that prevent them from reaching production.

You will be an owner — not just an implementer — with direct influence over architecture, implementation, and the reliability standards we hold ourselves to as a team.

What You Will Do

Own the CLOB and Matching Engine

• Design and implement a high-performance Central Limit Order Book with correct handling of order types, price-time priority, and partial fills
• Architect the matching engine for correctness and low latency — including crash recovery with full state consistency, handling concentrated order flow during volatility spikes, and correctness guarantees under failure
• Build resilience against adversarial patterns — spoofing, layering, and order placement spam — and enforce pre-trade controls including self-trade prevention, position limits, and max-order-size checks
• Contribute to the hybrid CLOB + RFQ routing layer that provides best execution across onchain and offchain liquidity

Build the Perpetuals and Derivatives Core

• Implement the perpetuals engine: position and margin accounting, continuous unrealized PnL calculation, funding rate clamping, and cross-collateralization across asset classes
• Design and implement funding rate clamping logic, cross-position settlement, and the protocol-level guarantees required for correctness under concurrent load
• Own the liquidation system: partial-to-full liquidation escalation, auto-deleveraging (ADL) with leverage-based ranking, insurance fund mechanics including penalty collection and depletion handling, and circuit breakers under correlated market stress

Own Risk Systems

• Own the real-time risk calculation layer: margin models, position exposure, and the system-level invariants that protect user capital
• Define and maintain correctness guarantees through automated testing, simulation, and continuous validation throughout the development lifecycle
• Lead adversarial testing and chaos simulation to surface failure modes proactively before production exposure
• Drive external audit preparation and participate in security reviews with clear technical ownership

Drive Technical Excellence

• Conduct architecture reviews and challenge designs at the implementation level
• Bring domain expertise into design discussions — including edge cases, failure patterns, and the constraints that emerge from operating these systems in production
• Mentor and elevate the broader trading systems team through code review, design sessions, and hands-on collaboration

Who You Are

Experience We're Looking For

• Production CLOB experience. You have designed, built, and operated a Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) in a live trading environment. You understand order matching internals, recovery under failure, and the edge cases that only surface under sustained production load.
• Perpetuals and derivatives depth. You have shipped a perpetuals engine or equivalent derivatives infrastructure — with real position accounting, margin mechanics, funding rates, and a liquidation system validated against market stress conditions.
• Risk system ownership. You have built or owned a real-time risk engine: margin models, position exposure tracking, and the logic that determines when and how positions are liquidated. You understand what gets missed and why.
• Low-latency systems expertise. You have built high-throughput, low-latency systems in Rust, Java, C++, or equivalent. You understand performance tradeoffs at the implementation level: memory layout, lock contention, GC pressure, and network I/O under load.
• 8+ years in software engineering, with significant tenure (3+ years) building and operating production trading infrastructure at a financial exchange, crypto trading venue, or high-performance fintech.

Technical Skills

• Languages: Proficiency in Rust, Java or C++. Production matching engines are built in these languages — familiarity with at least one at the systems level is required.
• Concurrency and systems: Strong understanding of threading models, lock-free data structures, memory layout, and Linux internals (CPU affinity, OS scheduling, kernel-bypass networking).
• High-throughput messaging: Hands-on experience with low-latency messaging infrastructure — Aeron, Chronicle Queue, Kafka, or equivalent. Understanding of how order flow moves through a system at sub-millisecond resolution.
• Distributed systems: State replication, consistency models, event-sourcing or WAL-based recovery, and failure handling under partial failure conditions.
• Testing for financial systems: Simulation-based and property-based testing; experience validating correctness at integration boundaries and under adversarial or chaos conditions.
  

Ideal Background

We are looking for engineers who have done some version of this before:

• Built and operated a production matching engine and CLOB at a centralized or decentralized exchange
• Shipped a perpetuals or derivatives trading system with live margin accounting and a liquidation engine
• Owned or directly built a risk management system on a financial trading platform
• Operated high-throughput trading infrastructure and personally resolved production incidents under pressure
• Built for global markets with strict reliability and latency requirements