Senior Rust Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems

About the role

OleOle is building a global, real-time social and messaging platform for sports fans - from the ground up, natively in Rust. This is not a feature role and not a task-driven role. We are looking for a senior backend engineer who has owned systems before and is comfortable making foundational architectural decisions that will not be rewritten later. You will design and evolve the backend architecture powering public conversations, real-time messaging, video, commerce, and token-based incentives for millions of users worldwide. What You'll Be Responsible For Designing and owning core backend architecture in Rust (async-first) Defining service boundaries, data ownership, and evolution strategy Designing scalable APIs (REST and/or GraphQL) for mobile and web clients Modeling and operating PostgreSQL as a long-term source of truth Architecting real-time systems (feeds, messaging, event-driven workflows) Making tradeoffs around consistency, latency, and scalability Working with DevOps while retaining backend architectural authority Reviewing critical code paths and preventing premature complexity Helping shape the backend team as the company grows What Makes Someone Successful in This Role - You have personally designed and operated production backend systems - You can explain architectural decisions and tradeoffs clearly - You understand what breaks at scale and how to prevent it - You focus on practical engineering over buzzwords - You are comfortable working without excessive process or hand-holding - You care about long-term system quality, not just shipping features - You have strong technical judgment and know when simplicity is the better solution We value real-world experience, ownership, and depth of understanding significantly more than keyword-heavy resumes. This role is hands-on, but judgment matters more than output volume. What You'll Be Building You will help lay the foundation for a native Rust platform that includes: A large-scale social graph (users, clubs, countries, conversations) Public feeds and real-time messaging Video and media delivery pipelines Token-based rewards and commerce API infrastructure used across mobile, web, and internal services Event-driven systems supporting live updates and notifications Required Experience 7-12+ years of professional backend engineering experience Proven ownership of backend systems in production Strong, real-world Rust experience (async systems, not experiments) Deep understanding of PostgreSQL data modeling and performance Experience designing APIs and explaining tradeoffs clearly Experience building or evolving systems that had to scale Ability to reason about architecture without hiding behind buzzwords If you've never been responsible for a system's long-term health, this is not the role. Nice to Have (Not Required) Experience with real-time systems (feeds, messaging, streaming) Experience with high-write or high-fanout workloads ETL / data pipelines Media or video delivery systems Token, wallet, or crypto-adjacent systems (non-blockchain core) Compensation & Stage Compensation is deferred until funding Meaningful equity and long-term ownership Founding-level responsibility and influence Small team, high autonomy, minimal process This role is for engineers who want ownership, not safety. What This Role Is NOT Not a ticket-driven implementation role Not a DevOps-led backend role Not a resume-padding opportunity Not suitable for junior or mid-level engineers

Requirements

• Your Background
• 7-12 years of software engineering experience (preferably at early-stage startups or high-growth platforms)
• 4+ years of experience working in Rust in production environments, ideally on scalable web or blockchain-native backends
• Strong experience designing modern, scalable backend architectures from scratch - including authentication, real-time messaging, microservices, APIs, caching, and database design
• Proficiency with Rust frameworks like Actix, Axum, Tokio, or Rocket
• Experience with WebAssembly, gRPC, or GraphQ

Benefits

Additional Information

We are hiring for two critical backend leadership roles. The first is to lead the development of our short-form video system-a TikTok-like feature built natively into the platform-covering the full pipeline from video upload and processing to delivery, feed ranking, and real-time engagement. This role requires experience with high-throughput media systems, low-latency delivery, and scalable feed architecture. The second role is to lead the build-out of our football history data engine, a large-scale structured content system designed for SEO, powering millions of pages across teams, players, and competitions. This includes designing data models, ingestion pipelines, and server-side rendering strategies to generate fast, search-optimized pages at scale. Both roles require strong ownership, system design capability, and the ability to build and ship foundational infrastructure in a startup environment. Founding Backend Rust Engineer

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