Functional Software Engineer
A functional programming engineer at a remote-first consultancy building production systems for capital markets and regulated industries, including substantial work on the Canton Network blockchain. Day to day: designing, testing, and maintaining backend, distributed, and blockchain software for client projects using strong types and domain modelling.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- USA - East Coast
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 5+ years of professional experience developing and delivering production software
- Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, testing, software design
- Experience with functional programming, professionally or through substantial projects
- Ability to reason about complex problems and translate requirements into well-structured software
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills
- Commitment to code quality, correctness, and maintainability
- Ability to communicate effectively and collaborate with other engineers
- Willingness to learn new technologies and work across different technical environments
Nice to have
- Experience with Haskell, Scala, OCaml, F#, Clojure, or another functional programming language
- Familiarity with type systems, algebraic data types, pattern matching, and immutable data structures
- Experience with strongly typed domain modelling and functional design patterns
- Exposure to distributed systems, concurrent programming, or backend infrastructure
- Experience in blockchain, financial infrastructure, capital markets, or similar correctness-critical domains
- Familiarity with property-based testing and techniques for validating complex software behaviour
- Experience with Nix or reproducible development environments
- Experience working in an engineering consultancy or collaborating directly with client teams
Full description
Obsidian Systems is a software engineering consultancy that builds production systems for capital markets and other regulated industries. Our clients include market infrastructure providers, national exchanges, and global financial institutions. Much of our work today centers on the Canton Network, the privacy-enabled blockchain adopted by major capital markets institutions, where Obsidian is one of the most experienced engineering firms in the ecosystem.
We're a remote-first, globally distributed team that values ownership, curiosity, and clear communication. We believe the best ideas come from people who ask difficult questions, take responsibility for their work, and collaborate openly to solve challenging problems.
About the Role
We're looking for a Functional Software Engineer to join our engineering team and contribute to challenging client projects across our technical domains. You'll design, develop, and maintain software using functional programming principles, working with engineers and client teams to turn complex requirements into robust, maintainable solutions. Depending on the project, your work may involve backend systems, domain modelling, distributed systems, financial infrastructure, blockchain applications, or developer tooling.
This role is suited to an engineer who enjoys reasoning about complex systems, values strong types and clear abstractions, and sees software development as more than simply making code work. Knowledge in every technology is not necessary. We value strong engineering fundamentals, a willingness to learn, and the ability to apply sound technical judgment to unfamiliar problems.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, implement, test, and maintain reliable software using functional programming principles.
- Develop clear, composable, and maintainable solutions to complex engineering problems.
- Apply strong typing, domain modelling, and abstraction to improve software correctness and reliability.
- Collaborate with engineers, technical leads, and client stakeholders to understand requirements and deliver effective solutions.
- Contribute to the design and architecture of systems, making thoughtful trade-offs between correctness, simplicity, performance, and maintainability.
- Write automated tests and use appropriate techniques to validate system behaviour.
- Review code, share technical knowledge, and contribute to engineering standards.
- Investigate and resolve complex technical issues across existing systems.
- Communicate technical decisions clearly and explain trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Adapt to different client environments, codebases, and technical challenges.