Small teams, hard problems, and full ownership from day one.
We believe the best work comes from small, focused teams with full ownership over their domain. Deciding what to build and how to build it.
We keep hierarchy 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.
We keep teams small. We'd rather hire a few exceptional engineers with high ownership and agency than a larger team of good ones.
London-based, in-person. The problems we work on are hard enough that the value of in-person collaboration is extremely high.
We sponsor UK work visas for candidates who need them and provide relocation support.
Open Roles
Platform Engineer
Systems Engineer
Platform Engineer
This role exists to increase the operating leverage of Gattaca’s engineering team.
You’ll own the production platform, developer experience, observability, deployment workflows, internal tooling, and the feedback loops that let engineers ship quickly.
At Gattaca, infrastructure directly affects market share and P&L. Strong production and platform engineers can have an outsized impact here because the platform is still early: there is room to set direction, establish the right operating model,choose the right abstractions and automations, and turn currently scattered workflows into reliable systems the whole team builds on.
Your day-to-day work will span these main areas:
Production systems and reliability
You’ll own the infrastructure and operational workflows that keep Gattaca’s production systems predictable. That means making deployments safe and repeatable, keeping rollback paths clear, improving host and service health, and making sure incidents are easy to understand when they happen.
Observability and alerting
You’ll help build the feedback loops engineers rely on to understand production. System metrics, logs, dashboards, traces,and alerts should make the state of the system obvious, especially when something is wrong. False alerting stopping that, helps to really understand the system to know what to alert and what not to.
Developer experience
Given the rate of work and the size of the team, a lot of operational work can become manual unless someone owns it properly. You’ll improve the path from local development to production: faster CI, more reliable builds, better test environments, cleaner deployment tooling, simpler configuration and secrets workflows, and internal tools that remove repetitive manual work. Small improvements here compound across the whole engineering team and make a big difference.
Infrastructure performance
Our systems are latency-sensitive, and infrastructure details matter. You’ll work close to the boundary between application code and the machines it runs on: host-level tuning, networking behaviour, kernel settings, CPU isolation, resource contention, noisy neighbours, and the practical details of running high-performance services in production.
AI and internal tooling
We want to use AI where it genuinely increases engineering leverage. As the team moves quickly, useful context can become fragmented across scripts, docs, dashboards, incident notes, one-off fixes, and individual engineers’ workflows. You’ll help turn that into shared tooling that runs safely.
Security
You'll help maintain the security and integrity of our systems, from production infrastructure to developer workstations. This includes access controls, secrets management, endpoint and infrastructure hardening, vulnerability management, and security monitoring, with a focus on making secure practices part of everyday engineering workflows.
Specifics we’re looking for
- High agency. A lot of the work will start as something vague. You should be comfortable finding these problems yourself, deciding what matters, and taking them from observation through to a real fix.
- High drive. There is a lot to improve, and platform engineers can be huge levers on team output. We want someone who moves quickly, raises the standard around them, and keeps pushing important work forward without needing a queue of tickets.
- Strong infrastructure fundamentals. You have experience deploying, managing, and automating cloud infrastructure.
- Experience with infrastructure automation and CI/CD. You should be comfortable building processes with simple tooling or automation.
- Good judgement around observability and operations. Alerts should be specific, actionable, and reserved for things that matter. Monitoring should reflect how the system actually behaves today, not how it behaved six months ago. If an alert becomes noisy, you should notice and fix it before the rest of the team notices it.
Skills we value, but aren’t a requirement
- Blockchain fundamentals, Ethereum infrastructure, the transaction supply chain, or Maximal Extractable Value (MEV).
- Experience managing infrastructure on AWS/Latitude/OVH.
- Experience with Terraform and Ansible.
- Experience with high-performance or latency-sensitive Linux production systems.
- Experience building internal tools used by other engineers.
- Top-of-market base salary.
- Bonus tied to company and individual performance.
- Equity on joining, with more earned through performance.
- Private healthcare.
Send to careers@gattaca.com:
- CV
- An answer to these three questions:
1. Describe your most exceptional piece of work or project.
- What was the team size and your specific role?
- Walk us through the key design decisions and why you made them.
- What would you do differently with hindsight?
- How long did it take, and what was the hardest part?
2. Why are you looking for a new opportunity?
3. Why Gattaca specifically? What do you know about what we do?
Systems Engineer
Your day-to-day work spans four key areas:
High-throughput optimisation
Every block, we process 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 our stack run end-to-end in low microseconds. Alongside the large sorting algorithms we have parts of our system that we keep ultra simple and low-latency. For example, when a bid update comes in from a relay, we need 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. We compete 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, for the Ethereum builder 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 Gattaca 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 our builders within the hour and will directly affect market share and P&L.
Specifics we’re looking for
- Strong systems programming in Rust, other low-level languages accepted with willingness to switch.
- 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.
- Deep understanding of how software interacts with hardware: CPU cache, memory layout, branch prediction, what the compiler actually emits. You've profiled, optimised, and know where time goes.
- High agency. You own things end-to-end: understand the system → analyse metrics → detect issues → fix them → deploy → iterate.
Skills we value, but aren’t a requirement
- Understanding how the blockchain VMs work e.g., Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
- Blockchain fundamentals, the transaction supply chain and Maximal Extractable Value (MEV).
- Networking optimisations: kernel networking stack, XDP, etc.
- Auction systems, game theory.
- 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 over 100% of base.
- Equity on joining, with more earned through performance.
- Private healthcare.
Send to careers@gattaca.com:
- CV
- An answer to these three questions:
1. Describe your most exceptional piece of work or project.
- What was the team size and your specific role?
- Walk us through the key design decisions and why you made them.
- What would you do differently with hindsight?
- How long did it take, and what was the hardest part?
2. Why are you looking for a new opportunity?
3. Why Gattaca specifically? What do you know about what we do?