Lead Backend Engineer - Feed Squad

ABOUT THNDR Thndr is on a mission to make investing simple and accessible for everyone across the Middle East and North Africa. Since launching in 2019 and going through Y Combinator shortly after, we have grown into Egypt's number one investing app, with millions of people putting their money to work in stocks, gold, mutual funds, and more, many of them investing for the very first time. We are licensed by Egypt's Financial Regulatory Authority and are a member of the Egyptian Exchange. In 2024 we expanded into the UAE under an ADGM license, and in 2025 we became the first remote retail trading member of the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange. That same year, the World Economic Forum named us a Technology Pioneer, the only Egyptian company alongside Apple, Google, Dropbox, and others. In 2026, The Financial Times named us the fastest growing company in Africa. We are backed by investors including Tiger Global, Prosus Ventures, BECO Capital, and Y Combinator, and we are only getting started.   THE TEAM YOU WOULD JOIN Today, roughly 40% of all transactions on the Egyptian Exchange flow through Thndr. Behind almost everything a user sees or relies on is market data, and the Feed team owns it. Live and delayed prices, statistics, charts, and asset data across every market we operate in all flow through systems we build and run. We ingest data from different providers, sometimes multiple per market, and expose it to the rest of Thndr through a single, unified feed. Nearly everything downstream depends on it: the live prices users watch, the alerts we fire when something moves, and the limit orders that execute off the numbers we serve. Our users range from first-time investors making a decision about where to put their money, to technical traders who need immediate, actionable insights. Every millisecond matters. When a price arrives late or wrong, it is not a cosmetic bug, it is real money for real people acting on information that has to arrive on time, every time. On top of that, we are building for scale, and one that is genuinely hard: a feed engineered to handle 100,000+ assets and hundreds of thousands of price updates a second, without dropping a beat. This is a sensitive system, and a foundational one. Providers fail, connections drop, and infrastructure gives out mid-session, and none of that is an excuse to stop serving users. Much of the hard part is staying correct and available when something upstream breaks: failing over in the middle of an open market, absorbing a provider outage, and keeping the feed flowing when the pieces underneath it do not. You would be working alongside some of our strongest engineers on problems that are unusually hard and unusually consequential, owning systems the rest of the platform quietly depends on.   WHAT YOU'LL DO - Set the technical direction for the feed services that serve market data across Egypt, UAE, US, and soon KSA, and lead the team building and operating them, balancing very low latency and high reliability at scale. - Own the SLOs and overall health of the feed as a system, holding the team to a high standard on observability, sensible on-call, and graceful failover when a provider drops or infrastructure gives out mid-market. - Set the direction on how we use our different databases and data models, Redis, ClickHouse, and Postgres, including how each behaves and when the team should reach for which. - Own the infrastructure the feed runs on. Understand how data reaches us from each provider, and decide where to build in redundancy so a single upstream failure never takes us down. - Identify technical debt and reliability risks across the systems your team owns, and set the priorities to steadily improve them. - Raise the bar on quality and operational discipline for the whole team, leading through code and design reviews, pairing, and mentoring the engineers around you.   WHAT YOU'LL NEED - A strong track record of leading the design, delivery, and operation of reliable backend systems in production, used by large numbers of people. - Real depth in distributed systems, and a clear understanding of what it takes to keep them fast and correct under load and under failure. - Experience owning systems end to end, from design through production and on-call, and setting that same bar for the engineers around you. You care not just about writing the code, but about how it behaves when a provider drops or a node fails. - A feel for performance, and the instinct to treat latency and throughput as first-class concerns rather than afterthoughts. - Familiarity with our stack, or the confidence to get there quickly: Python, C#, .NET Core, Golang, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Redis, and ClickHouse. - A high bar for correctness and operational discipline, and the judgment to instill that same bar in others. You understand what it means to run a system where a mistake has real consequences for real people. - A clear, candid communicator who can set technical direction, mentor other engineers, hold their own with other engineers, and work closely with the teams that build on what you provide.   NICE TO HAVE - Experience leading or mentoring engineers, formally or informally, and setting technical direction for a team. - Experience building systems optimized for real-time performance, where latency and throughput are on the line. - Experience with ClickHouse or similar OLAP databases, and the query and schema patterns that get the most out of them. - Experience in fintech, brokerage, trading, or another regulated, high-stakes domain where correctness and timing matter. - Experience operating hybrid infrastructure. Ours runs on-prem in Egypt and on AWS in the UAE.   WHY THIS ROLE TThe feed sits underneath almost everything Thndr does. Every price a user watches, every alert we send, and every order that fires does so because the feed delivered the right number at the right moment. As Lead Engineer, you would set the technical direction for one of the most performance-critical systems in the company, the kind of work where being fast and being correct are the same problem, and shape how a strong team of engineers builds and runs it at real scale across multiple markets. If setting the bar for systems that have to be fast, correct, and trusted without exception sounds like your kind of challenge, we would love to hear from you.   WHO ARE WE? Thndr was founded on a bold dream to democratize access to investing through smart tech and human-centric design. This is simply our way of saying we give anyone with a smartphone the simple and easy access they need to preserve and grow their wealth. At the same time, we’re shaping the future of investing while actively driving the economies we serve by promoting local investment products.   History has shown that investing is the single greatest way to build long-term wealth, but before Thndr, only a very small percentage of people had access to it due to: - High barriers to entry — In the form of excessive minimum account balances, complex, outdated onboarding, and low financial literacy. - Irrelevant experience — Catered toward expert traders and financial specialists, therefore alienating the majority of the population. - Fragmented offering — Investment products were not gathered in a single, intuitive outlet.   We don't just talk about change, we deliver it. Here's a glimpse into our impact so far: - 5.5 million app downloads - EGP 1B+ average daily traded value across 2025 - #1 digital investing platform in Egypt for the third consecutive year - 76% of users are first-time investors - 40% of our users come from outside of capital cities and have previously had limited access to financial institutions   Building on the success of our core platform, we are continuing to change culture and break down barriers by launching Rumble, the subscription-based investment recommendations platform.   Rumble was born with the vision to empower everyday individuals to build wealth confidently and intelligently through access to timely and in-depth advice from the industry’s top experts. Going beyond traditional investment advice, it offers long and short-term investment recommendations and financial content through engaging articles and videos that guide users on their financial journey and maximize their returns.   At Thndr, we're looking for people driven by our mission to help us democratize investing across the MENA region.