Building Infrastructure for One of the Fastest Growing Fintech Startups

In April, Paxos raised $300 million at a valuation of $2.4 billion in its series D investment round. As one of the fastest growing fintech startups, Paxos continues to accelerate growth and is hiring new team members across all functions. Today, our senior software engineer Peter is here to share his experience.

 


What is your background?

My first job out of college was in Texas at a very small healthcare company. I worked there for about 4 years in a small development team and was trusted to take ownership of the application. It really helped me grow as an Engineer and build my confidence.

Later, I worked at Bank of America. I had the chance to work directly with the traders and created a single page heatmap application for the mortgages trading desk that got demoed at the BofA town hall, which was an exciting platform to share my accomplishment.

Most recently, I worked at ClassPass, a tech startup that serves as a hub for fitness studios. I spent my last year there integrating new technology to build the streaming infrastructure and truly enjoyed it. This experience got me interested in being more of an infrastructure engineer.

Why did you join Paxos?

After the first round of interviews and talking to engineering manager Alan Jenson for the securities product, I learnt how the securities team is building applications that require the scalability to handle thousands of transactions in a second. Those are really the types of problems I want to solve. Also, I was interested in the potential for crypto, which made Paxos even more exciting for me.

What are your responsibilities at Paxos?

I’m a senior software engineer on the securities team responsible for SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) of our team. I handle all the infrastructure changes and take the lead on researching and integrating new technology with our current stack. I also work with other teams to figure out best practices and to create a uniform tech stack across all of Paxos. 

What do you like about working at Paxos?

First of all, I like how empowered I am to solve problems. I’ve always been a self-starter at work so this environment works really well for me. Also, I like how easy it is for me to know who to talk to about specific problems, whether on my team or in the general engineering team. Everyone is available for meetings and are generally very helpful whenever they can be. Last but not least, I also like that even though I spend a lot of time working alone, I can easily reach out for help whenever I need it and can also use my manager as a sounding board even if he’s not as knowledgeable on a specific subject as I am.

What goals do you have for yourself?

I hope to keep growing as an engineer, especially as a DevOps Engineer/SRE. I want to see the securities team grow to a point where our applications are handling millions of transactions and settlements a day. I really hope that we don’t need to wait T+2 days to settle trades and soon the whole industry will be able to settle them within minutes or seconds.


We will continue hiring across all functions. Learn more about our openings and read more about our work culture.

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