About the Role
Forkast is a prediction market where crypto traders and gamers predict real-world events. Real-time, high-integrity infrastructure where every millisecond counts. We’re looking for a hands-on Systems Architect to take our trading engine from exceptional to elite.
The ideal candidate has scaled production-grade systems at serious volume. This isn’t a whiteboard-only position. This is a high-stakes engineering role at the intersection of finance, crypto, and frontier prediction market systems design.
You’ll be solving performance bottlenecks, owning major redesigns, and championing best practices in distributed computing.
What You’ll Do
* Lead the evolution of our trading engine, scaling throughput, reliability, and latency.
* Design and optimize the integration between off-chain matching engines and on-chain settlement (USDC on Arbitrum).
* Apply industry-standard approaches to distributed systems design, ensuring consistency, fault tolerance, and correctness.
* Establish and implement robust observability practices, including tracing, metrics, logging, and alerting.
* Design and scale data storage systems, including database partitioning, sharding, and performance tuning.
* Guide the team in implementing complex designs correctly through code reviews, technical direction, and hands-on collaboration.
* Step in as a builder when needed: implement performance-critical components, optimize in-memory order books, and improve messaging and data pipelines.
What We’re Looking For
* Proven experience scaling high-throughput, low-latency trading systems or similar distributed platforms in production.
* Deep understanding of trading engine architecture, including settlement, batching, state consistency, and failure modes.
* Hands-on experience with system-level performance optimization and distributed systems.
* Practical experience setting up and operating monitoring, tracing, and observability tools at scale.
* Experience designing and scaling databases, including partitioning strategies and data access optimization.
* Coding alongside the team. Hands-on contributions, not just oversight.
* Ability to guide a team in adopting industry standards and implementing them consistently.
Nice-to-Have
* Experience with prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, or hybrid CeFi/DeFi systems.
* Familiarity with cloud-scale infrastructure, production operations, and large-scale data storage.
* Familiarity with trading agents using open agent platforms like OpenClaw
Why This Role
* Directly influence the architecture and scalability of a high-performance trading platform.
* Work hands-on with top-tier engineers on genuinely hard distributed systems problems.
* Competitive compensation and equity for a role with real technical ownership and impact.