Lead Engineer, Risk Technology

About Bullish
Bullish is an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. These include: Bullish Exchange - a regulated and institutionally focused digital assets spot and derivatives exchange, integrating a high-performance central limit order book matching engine with automated market making to provide deep and predictable liquidity. Bullish Exchange is regulated in Germany, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar. CoinDesk Indices - a collection of tradable proprietary and single-asset benchmarks and indices that track the performance of digital assets for global institutions in the digital assets and traditional finance industries. CoinDesk Data - a broad suite of digital assets market data and analytics, providing real-time insights into prices, trends, and market dynamics. CoinDesk Insights - a digital asset media and events provider and operator of Coindesk.com, a digital media platform that covers news and insights about digital assets, the underlying markets, policy, and blockchain technology.

Reports to:
Director, Engineering

Engineering Organization & Culture

At Bullish, we are engineering the institutional standard for the digital asset industry. Our mission is to build a platform where security and compliance are the foundational core, requiring a commitment to technical excellence that goes beyond simply delivering code. We operate as a global engineering organization, setting a high bar in a demanding environment for those driven to do the best work of their careers alongside world-class peers.

We value engineers who treat development as a craft and own the outcome from concept to deployment. You will be expected to navigate the unknown, bring structure to ambiguity, and help shape the frameworks and processes that drive our global teams forward. We refuse to compromise on quality and seek problem solvers who thrive on high-impact technical challenges.

The Team: Risk Engineering

The Risk Engineering team builds the high-performance computational backbone that safeguards our exchange operations. Bridging quantitative finance and systems engineering, we optimize the mission-critical risk calculations that evaluate margin requirements, stress scenarios, and portfolio exposures in real-time, ensuring every trade is backed by solid financial guardrails. Our technical domain spans low-latency JVM optimization, zero-allocation hot paths and complex financial modeling.

We are seeking a highly experienced Java Backend Engineer to lead the development of our high-performance risk systems. You will leverage your extensive experience to build clean, maintainable, performant applications; promote best practices, and collaborate closely with our quantitative and product teams.

What You'll Do

• High-Performance JVM Engineering: Design and build high-quality, scalable and performant low/zero-GC JVM services and APIs
• Technical Translation & Risk Modeling: Understand risk models & decompose complex business requirements into well tested implementations.
• Strategic Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate directly with quantitative analysts and product teams to build robust solutions for financial products and risk models.
• Continuous Codebase Optimization: Optimize and refactor the existing codebase to enhance testing, performance and maintainability
• Engineering Excellence: Be a bastion of code quality and best practices, paired with a performance mindset.

What You'll Bring

• Professional Experience: 10+ years of experience as a Java backend engineer
• Mindset and Ownership: Strong sense of ownership and ability to thrive in a dynamic startup environment.
• Language Mastery: Expert proficiency in Java, including hands-on experience in architecting highly performant, low-latency systems.
• Testing Methodologies: In-depth knowledge of testing methodologies, including TDD, back testing and stress testing
• Software Design Excellence: Well versed in Agile methodologies, DRY, Clean Code, API design and micro-services.
• Technical Ecosystem: Experience in a full range of tools such as Git, Docker, Kubernetes, GCP
• Financial Products Expertise: Comprehensive understanding of financial products, risk models and methodologies (SPAN, VaR etc)
• Analytical Aptitude: Exceptional mathematical and analytical skills.
• Educational Foundation: Degree in Computer Science or related field

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with event-sourced architectures, columnar storage/databases, cloud technologies, Chronicle Queue, Kotlin
• Experience mentoring and providing technical guidance to junior engineers through pairing, collaboration and code reviews.

Bullish is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are fast evolving and striving towards being a globally-diverse community. With integrity at our core, our success is driven by a talented team of individuals and the different perspectives they are encouraged to bring to work every day.