Max Kaido

Senior backend/platform engineer building live systems where correctness, reliability, observability, and operational ownership matter.

Remote-first. Open to contract / B2B work, or strong full-time startup roles with clear ownership and serious engineering problems.

Email [email protected] View selected work

Summary

Senior / Lead backend engineer with 10+ years of production experience across trading systems, fintech-style execution flows, Web3 infrastructure, high-throughput product backends, and startup delivery under tight constraints.

Strongest recent project: Mercury, an AI-native, profitable, production-ready trading engine built in an unfamiliar, execution-sensitive domain where the feedback loop is brutally clear: PnL.

Backend is the lead story: TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Redis, distributed services, event-driven flows, Docker, Kubernetes/Swarm, Terraform, observability, and production ops. Supporting frontend depth when product/ops surfaces need to ship.

Core strengths

Live backend systems

Execution flows, state machines, real-time updates, high-concurrency APIs, correctness under failure.

Platform and reliability

Observability, runtime diagnostics, incident debugging, rollout discipline, infra automation, HA data layers.

Trading and market systems

Multi-strategy execution, portfolio constraints, risk-aware automation, bot fleets, market-regime learning.

AI-native engineering

LLM research and validation loops separated from deterministic execution and risk controls.

Selected experience

Lead Backend Engineer / System Architect - Mercury

Jan 2025 - Present

Created an AI-native, profitable, production-ready private trading engine in a hard domain with an objective success metric: PnL.
Built multi-intent execution, deterministic risk controls, market-neutral portfolio posture, HA PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB, and runtime validation workflows.
Used frontier AI for coding and strategy development while keeping execution and risk paths explicit where determinism matters.

Lead Backend Engineer - Flagship

Feb 2024 - Jan 2025

Architected a real-time backend for a gamified airdrop product serving 10k+ concurrent users.
Built per-minute portfolio recalculation against live market data and a dual-state anti-cheat architecture.
Delivered the core product in two months, helping enable $2.5M in bridge funding.

Backend Engineer / Trading Infrastructure - BlockchainBull

Aug 2023 - Oct 2023

Operated 80 concurrent Hummingbot instances for automated trading.
Built Telegram-based operational control and acoustic telemetry for real-time monitoring and tuning.

Web3 R&D Lead - Wiki Wager

May 2023 - Jul 2023

Built a decentralized betting prototype using Wikipedia, Chainlink Functions, and GPT-3.5 for outcome resolution.
Designed a truth-duration mechanism to reduce vulnerability to temporary source manipulation.

Stack

TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, Python, Solidity, PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, Redis, MongoDB, Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes/GKE, Terraform, Ansible, Google Cloud, Firebase, AWS, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki, REST, gRPC, WebSockets, Kafka/RabbitMQ/Redis-backed workers, Jest, Zod, React, Next.js, TanStack, Zustand, Tailwind.

Education

Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Applied Mathematics & Informatics, 2004-2009.

Hiring path

Best inbound path: [email protected]. Send the problem, timeline, expected ownership, and whether this is contract, B2B, or full-time.