Lead Engineer, Trading Platform Engineering at Bullish

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: Trading Platform Engineering The Trading Platform Engineering team is responsible for designing and optimizing the high-performance, mission-critical foundation that powers our trading activities. Operating at the intersection of software and hardware, the team builds low-latency systems that demand expert-level proficiency in Linux kernel internals, networking pipelines, and distributed systems architecture. The team focuses on architectural excellence, reliability, determinism, and the relentless elimination of tail latency. What You’ll Do High-Performance Service Development: Design, build, and optimize high-performance systems using C and Java. Kernel & User Space Engineering: Engineer performance-critical components across user space and kernel interfaces, focusing on memory, scheduling, I/O, and networking paths. Advanced Networking: Develop and tune networking pipelines (multicast/unicast UDP and TCP) and implement kernel-bypass or fast-path networking (e.g., DPDK, XDP). Kernel Optimization: Interact wit