Software Engineer

About Iqana Iqana is a Barcelona-based quantitative trading firm building systematic, risk-managed exposure to digital assets. We are registered with the CNMV and were the first firm in Spain authorized under MiCA to provide discretionary crypto portfolio management — which means our systems run real institutional capital under real regulatory scrutiny. We serve family offices, hedge funds and asset managers through non-custodial separately managed accounts (SMAs). Our proprietary strategies and risk framework sit on infrastructure we build ourselves: data ingestion, strategy research, execution, monitoring and reporting. We've chosen to stay small. Under ten people run the entire firm, and we intend to keep the bar high rather than the headcount. In practice that means no layers between you and the people making decisions: you work directly with the founders and C-level, and with advisors who have built and run this kind of business before. The systems you build now are the ones Iqana will run on for years. _________________________________ About the Opportunity We're looking for a Software Engineer to help build and scale the backbone of our trading and SMA execution platform. Your primary axis is data and execution infrastructure: market data pipelines, venue integrations, and the execution and monitoring systems that keep client accounts trading correctly. A growing secondary axis is the tooling behind our AI research workflows — the agentic pipeline our quant team uses to generate, audit and backtest strategy ideas. The difference between this and most crypto engineering roles is the standard of correctness. Regulated discretionary management means our pipelines are auditable, our execution is reconciled, and mistakes are visible to clients and to the regulator. If building systems that have to be right appeals to you more than shipping fast and cleaning up later, you'll enjoy this. You'll work directly with our CTO alongside quant researchers, ML engineers and software engineers. Are you passionate about AI, Digital Assets, finance, prediction markets, and building systems that transform how people invest? Do you want to work across cutting-edge infrastructure, the latest data sources, and high-impact execution systems? If so, this role is for you. _________________________________ What a Typical Week Might Look Like Build and extend market data pipelines — exchange APIs, on-chain sources, historical and streaming.Improve execution systems: order routing, reconciliation, fallback logic, new venue integrations.Ship internal dashboards and monitoring so the team can see what live strategies are doing in real time.Work with the CTO on architecture decisions as the platform scales with AUM.Build tooling that supports our AI research pipeline.Review logs, chase down anomalies, and harden the parts of the system that woke someone up last week.Join weekly product and strategy sessions with the founding team. _________________________________ Key Responsibilities Data infrastructure — Architect and optimize market data ingestion and ETL pipelines across multiple crypto exchange APIs and on-chain sources.Execution and monitoring — Build and maintain the systems that place, track and reconcile trades across client accounts, plus the dashboards and alerting around them.Backend APIs — Design scalable REST and WebSocket services connecting research, trading and client-facing systems.Cloud-native systems — Deploy and operate on AWS with an eye to performance, cost and fault tolerance.AI research tooling — Help build the infrastructure that lets autonomous agents analyze datasets, critique findings, and produce structured research output. _________________________________ What We’re Looking For 3+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in a startup or another fast-moving environment.Working knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and cloud-native architecture.Strong Python.Experience building robust ETL or streaming data pipelines.Hands-on experience integrating third-party APIs, including the messy ones.Comfort turning complex, imperfect datasets into structured, explainable outputs.Interest in AI-driven research tooling or agent-based systems. _________________________________ Nice to Have Experience with financial data, trading systems or quant research platforms.Familiarity with market microstructure, order book modeling or execution algorithms.Experience building backtesting or simulation frameworks.Docker/Kubernetes, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD and DevSecOps practice.Familiarity with DeFi protocols, blockchain analytics or on-chain data.Experience with agent-based architectures and autonomous research frameworks. _________________________________ What’s in it for you? Early core team: You'd be one of a handful of engineers building this platform, not one of a hundred maintaining it. What you ship in your first year defines how Iqana will operate for the next five.Real systems, real capital: Your work supports live strategies managing institutional money, inside a regulated perimeter. Very few engineers get that at this stage of a company.Careers move fast here: We're small and growing quickly, which means scope arrives far sooner than it would elsewhere. Engineers who deliver take on more in months rather than years, and compensation is reviewed twice a year to keep up.Ownership and autonomy: You design, build and ship. No layers, no bureaucracy, and a direct line to everyone who makes decisions here.Equity: A meaningful stake through our phantom share plan — we'd rather have you own a piece of this than not. _________________________________ Career Progression As one of our first engineers, you'll start by owning critical systems and infrastructure design. From there the path runs through Sr. Software Engineer, Tech Lead for Trading Infrastructure and, as the team grows, toward Head of Engineering, building and mentoring the engineers who will scale Iqana's technology. How fast you move along it is largely up to you. _________________________________ Compensation At Iqana, we believe in transparency and competitiveness: Base Salary Range: €38,000 - €51,000 gross annual + 10-20% bonusEquity: Meaningful stake via our phantom share planReviews: Compensation reviewed twice per year