About Decibel
Decibel is a high-performance, fully on-chain trading platform built in collaboration with Aptos Labs and the Decibel Foundation. Designed to match the speed of high performance trading, Decibel offers spot, perpetuals, and yield products through a unified, self-custodial interface. The platform runs on the Aptos blockchain, leveraging its sub-20ms block times and parallel execution to support real-time settlement, cross-margining, and modular vault strategies. Decibel aims to serve as the execution layer for the Aptos global trading engine, empowering traders, developers, and institutions with scalable, composable financial infrastructure.
The role
You'll join a small team of traders, quants, and developers, working closely together to design, build, and operate our trading infrastructure. In this role, you'll help to develop and maintain our market making, pricing, hedging, and monitoring systems, while also keeping a close eye on live performance and resolving issues in real time.
What you will do
- Build and maintain market making, hedging, and inventory management systems across centralized venues and on-chain markets
- Write and ship production-grade code for execution, connectivity, monitoring, and PnL attribution
- Analyse trading performance and drive experimentation around parameter tuning, signal generation, and order placement logic, supported by rigorous backtesting.
- Monitor risk in real time across spot, perpetuals, and on-chain inventory, tightening the feedback loop between observed PnL and the underlying code
- Partner with our protocol and product teams on new launches, token listings, and evolving market structures
What we are looking for
- 2 to 4 years at a TradFi prop, HFT, or top systematic fund in a quant dev, core dev, or trader-engineer seat
- Production-grade engineering chops across multiple of the following: Rust, C++, Java, Python. We expect strong Python plus real systems experience in at least one of Rust, C++, or Java
- Hands-on experience with order management systems, smart order routers, or execution engines in a low-latency environment
- Comfort reading exchange protocol docs, debugging connectivity at the network layer, and reasoning about latency budgets end-to-end
- Multi-venue portfolio and trading system experience and the ability to think clearly about inventory, hedging, and risk across more than one book
- Genuine intellectual interest in market microstructure: order book dynamics, queue position, adverse selection, fee tiers, maker/taker economics
- A portfolio: GitHub, writeups, side projects, internal tools, anything you can talk about in detail and defend
- Ability to overlap with at least one of SG, HK, or Tokyo trading hours
Strong pluses
- Crypto or digital asset experience: market making on major CEX / DEX, or running on-chain strategies
- Familiarity with Aptos, Move, Solidity, or the mechanics of any on-chain perps venue
- Exposure to options market making
- Open source contributions to trading infrastructure, exchange SDKs, or DeFi protocols
Crypto experience is welcome but not required; however, experience with HFT trading systems is essential
How we work
Small, senior team. You will own real surface area from week one. We ship aggressively, and treat the trading stack as a product. No quant research wall to throw ideas over, you do both. Direct feedback, short loops, no theater.
Compensation
- Competitive base
- Meaningful token allocation
- Variable comp tied to delivery and team performance
Our Benefits
- Insurance premium coverage
- Flexible vacation time
- Competitive Salary
- Protocol Token Grants
Decibel Foundation is committed to diversity in the workplace, and we’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not hire on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, parental status, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, or any other basis protected by local, state or federal law. All employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need.
We are committed to providing a safe and secure hiring process for all applicants. Unfortunately, there are individuals who may attempt to impersonate Aptos or our employees for fraudulent purposes.
To protect yourself, please be aware of the following:
- We will never ask you for payment of any kind during the application or onboarding process, including fees for background checks, training, or equipment.
- We will always communicate with you using our official company email domain.
- We will never request your personal financial information, such as your social security number or bank account details, during the initial application stages or via email or a video/voice call when onboarding.