Founding Engineer – Full Stack at Shadow

At Ventuals, we’re building onchain markets that enable anyone to get exposure to technological progress and adoption — starting with perpetual futures for pre-IPO companies.

Private equities are a $13+ trillion asset class that retail has been locked out of for too long. Top startups have stayed private for longer than ever, leaving no way for everyday investors to participate in their growth.

Ventuals makes private markets public — enabling anyone to trade top private companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, Anthropic, and Stripe.

We’re building on Hyperliquid, and have had amazing testnet traction in the 2 months since launch, with ~10,000 weekly active traders and >1M cumulative trades, and zero marketing spend.

Our seed round was led by Paradigm, with additional angels from Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap, and Flashbots.

Our small, world-class team is mostly based in New York, and we often work out of a beautiful office in Soho with other early-stage Paradigm portfolio companies.

About the role

We’re looking for a senior or staff-level engineer to join Ventuals ahead of our mainnet launch. You’ll be shaping the user experience, trading systems, and infrastructure that our users will interact with on day one.

As a generalist, you’ll work across the entire stack – from shipping frontend features on our Next.js app, to building core trading APIs, to scaling the infrastructure that power our exchange.

What you'll do (responsibilities)

We're looking for an experienced IC who wants to:

• Ship user-facing features in TypeScript, React, and Next.js

• Build backend services that power our exchange, including trading, market data, indexing, and monitoring systems

• Help shape the product roadmap and strategy alongside the founders and the rest of the team

What we're looking for (qualifications)

You're a senior or staff-level IC that has built technical user-facing products before. We’re looking for someone that feels a deep sense of duty to the users of their work.

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, ambiguous startup environment

• Strong track record of ownership and high-agency execution

• Pragmatic builder who can write clean, maintainable code but knows when to move fast

• Excellent written and verbal communication; strong technical documentation skills

• Curiosity and adaptability; willing to dive into new technical domains quickly

Why join

• Work on a frontier product with clear, proven user demand

• High autonomy and outsized impact as one of the first engineers

• Be part of a high-performance, low-ego culture that values grit, excellence, and execution

• Partner directly with founders on product and technical strategy

Who you'll be working with

Emily (Co-Founder and CTO) — Previously CTO at Shadow, Paradigm EIR, and Staff Engineer → Engineering Manager at Airbnb, where she built the realtime indexer for user profiling used sitewide and managed a team of 15 engineers. Has been highly active onchain since DeFi summer 2020.

Alvin (Co-Founder and CEO) — Previously CEO at Shadow, Paradigm EIR, and Designer → Staff Product Manager at Airbnb, where he was the first PM on Airbnb Plus and helped take it from a whiteboard idea to a $100M/yr business in 2.5 years. Has been highly active onchain since DeFi Summer 2020.

Emily and Alvin are siblings and have worked together for the past 10 years!

What we offer (compensation & benefits)

Highly competitive salary and equity — we target 90th percentile compensation for both salary and equity. You’ll be expected to act like an owner, because you are one.

Great healthcare — gold-tier company healthcare plans. We cover 99% of medical, dental, vision premiums for employees, and 50% for dependents.

401k — flexible 401k retirement plan with contribution matching.

Hardware setup — we’ll buy whatever you need to be productive.