Systems Engineer - Rust- Thriving Crypto Tech Firm

About the company This is an engineering-driven crypto technology company based in London. They build and operate Titan, the largest block builder on Ethereum. They are venture-backed and have been profitable for the past three years. Blockchains have created something genuinely new: a trustless, shared layer for financial instruments. For that to work at scale, the network needs infrastructure that can support extremely high throughput and sophisticated trading, while keeping the underlying system decentralised. That's what is being built here. Ultra-performant infrastructure that keeps decentralised networks efficient. What you'd work on Your day-to-day work spans four key areas: High-throughput optimisation Every block, processing tens of thousands of transactions, each simulated hundreds to thousands of times through the VM when running different sorting algorithms trying to find the optimal transaction ordering in an NP-hard problem. Alongside the other blockchain problems like computing the full state merkle trie for each block. At this scale, saving even a single microsecond in frequently called code compounds across millions of calls. Low-latency systems Parts of the stack run end-to-end in low microseconds. Alongside the large sorting algorithms, there are parts of the system kept ultra simple and low-latency. For example, when a bid update comes in from a relay, it's important to calculate a bid response and forward it to the relay before competitors do. This is the kind of work where finding big improvements is hard and requires smaller, specific optimisations. Competitive dynamics Block building is an adversarial game. Competing against other builders every slot, watching how they sort transactions, how they adjust bids, what patterns emerge in their behaviour. A lot of the work here requires spending significant time analysing patterns, finding insights, and turning them into engineering or strategic changes that directly affect P&L. Innovation The block building landscape is constantly evolving. Sorting algorithms and types of orderflow are changing. New ways for traders to access blockspace keep emerging. Protocol changes reshape the competitive surface. For example, on Ethereum ePBS ships in the next hardfork, moving bid submission from direct connections to relays to (at least for a subset of blocks) the Ethereum p2p layer. Optimising here is an entirely different problem to optimising a direct TCP connection to a relay. This isn't a mature domain where you're only optimising at the margins. There's genuine room to define how things work, both within the company and across the ecosystem. You'd own systems end-to-end, from design through deployment through iteration. The code you write can be shipped to one of their instances within the hour and will directly affect market share and P&L. How they work They believe the best work comes from small, focused teams with full ownership over their domain. Deciding what to build and how to build it. Hierarchy is kept as minimal as possible. Engineers own problems, not tasks. You'll have significant autonomy from day one. After a few months you'll be driving the full loop: ideation ? building ? deploying ? monitoring ? iterating. Teams are kept small. They'd rather hire a few exceptional engineers with high ownership and agency than a larger team of good ones. What you'd bring Strong systems programming in Rust, other low-level languages accepted with willingness to switch. Comfortable with concurrency: lock-free structures, synchronisation primitives, reasoning about data flow across cores. Sharp problem-solving. The domain is adversarial and fast-moving. You'll need to reason through novel situations, spot patterns others miss, and think strategically. High agency. You own things end-to-end: understand the system ? analyse metrics ? detect issues ? fix them ? deploy ? iterate. Skills that are valued, but aren't a requirement Understanding how the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) works Understanding of how software interacts with hardware: CPU cache, memory layout, branch prediction, what the compiler actually emits. Blockchain fundamentals, the transaction supply chain and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) Networking optimisations: kernel networking stack, XDP, etc. Auction systems, game theory No crypto background required. Several of their strongest engineers came with zero blockchain experience - what transfers is depth and the ability to learn fast. Logistics London-based, in-person. The problems they work on are hard enough that the value of in-person collaboration is extremely high. Flexibility is key when life requires it, you have agency over how you get the work done, but the default is being in the office with the team. UK work visas are available for candidates who need them. Compensation Top-of-market base salary plus a guaranteed minimum bonus. Bonus is uncapped and tied directly to company P&L. Strong performers have taken home ove