Chief Technology Officer @ Astera Holdings
Location: Remote (Preference for New York)
Reports to: CEO
About Astera Holdings:
Astera Holdings is a quantitative finance firm on a mission to build the "Renaissance Technologies of prediction markets." We are transforming this emerging category—where traders bet on real-world event outcomes—from a speculative frontier into a rigorous, scientific asset class. We are looking for a rare breed of builder to co-author this new chapter in quantitative finance.
Our company operates on a synergistic, three-pillar structure:
- Astera Capital: Our institutional asset management arm, designed to generate absolute, uncorrelated returns by systematically exploiting market inefficiencies.
- BetSmart: Our consumer-facing DaaS application, which makes smart betting accessible.
- Astera Analytics: Our premier B2B consulting partner, which deploys our core intelligence to solve complex enterprise challenges.
These pillars power the Astera Flywheel: a closed-loop system where proprietary data from each business unit feeds our central Astera Intelligence Engine, creating a compounding, unassailable competitive moat. Our culture is a "Meritocracy of Minds," defined by Radical Intellectual Honesty, a Scientific Approach to Everything, and Lean Intensity.
The Opportunity: Build the Technology for the Next Alternative Asset Class
This is a career-defining opportunity to be the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Astera Holdings. We are not hiring a manager to oversee legacy systems; we are seeking a true technology partner to build our platform from the ground up.
If you are a CTO or Head of Engineering at a top-tier quantitative firm who is frustrated by the immense technical debt, siloed systems, and glacial pace of innovation, this role is your blank canvas. This is your chance to build a unified, modern, and elegant technology stack from first principles—your architecture, your technology choices, your legacy. You will have the autonomy, resources, and significant equity stake required to build the definitive operating system for a new financial asset class.
What You'll Build: The Blueprint for a New Financial OS
As CTO, you are the master architect of Astera’s entire technological nervous system. Your mandate is to design and build a greenfield, world-class platform that provides a sustainable competitive advantage across all three of our business pillars.
- The Core Alpha Platform: You will lead the architectural design of the firm's central research and signal processing platform. Your primary mandate is to build a sophisticated system that ingests and processes vast alternative datasets to generate predictive alpha. This includes engineering a proprietary data feedback loop that systematically captures and analyzes the market's reaction to our own trading activity, creating a compounding data advantage that is difficult for competitors to replicate.
- The Full-Stack Quant Platform: You will have complete ownership over the engineering and deployment of the entire infrastructure that powers our research and trading. This is a hands-on leadership role that will build and oversee:
- Data Infrastructure: Engineer a high-throughput, low-latency data platform to ingest, normalize, and store petabytes of structured and unstructured data. This includes building a centralized data lake and feature store that serves both historical backtesting and live production trading with perfect consistency.
- Research & MLOps Platform: Create a frictionless research environment where quants can rapidly iterate on ideas. You will build a world-class MLOps pipeline that allows for seamless model productionization, turning Python-based research into resilient, high-performance production code without manual intervention.
- Low-Latency Trading Systems: Architect our core trading and execution systems from the ground up. This includes building the order management system (OMS), market data handlers, and execution algorithms in high-performance languages (C++/Rust) to minimize latency and slippage.
- Core Infrastructure & DevOps: Implement and manage a modern, cloud-native infrastructure. You will own the CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes orchestration, network security, and ensure high availability and operational dominance for all trading and data systems.
- The AI-First Operating System: In close partnership with the Chief AI Officer (CAIO), you will co-architect the firm's central nervous system: a unified, AI-driven operating system designed to amplify the cognitive output and execution velocity of every team at Astera. This goes beyond the trading platform; it's about building the foundational technology that enables radical efficiency and data-driven decision-making across the entire organization.
- The Engineering Culture & Elite Team: You will recruit, lead, and mentor a world-class team of software, data, and MLOps engineers. You will set the technical vision and foster a culture of engineering excellence, radical intellectual honesty, and "lean intensity."
Who You Are: The Architect & Builder
- A Proven Systems Architect from an Elite Environment: You have a significant track record of architecting, building, and scaling complex, data-intensive, low-latency systems within a top-tier quantitative hedge fund or proprietary trading firm. You have lived the pain of legacy systems and know how to build it right.
- A Full-Lifecycle Platform Builder: You are a systems thinker who has built or had deep oversight over the entire quant technology lifecycle—from data ingestion and research platforms to production trading and post-trade analysis. You are frustrated by the artificial walls between research and engineering and are driven to build a single, unified platform.
- A Deeply Technical, Hands-On Leader: You possess master-level fluency in the tools of modern systems engineering (Cloud platforms like AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Spark, Kafka) and high-performance programming (C++, Rust, Python). You can lead from the front, command the respect of elite engineers, and contribute directly to the most critical parts of the codebase.
- An Institutional Strategist with an Owner's Mindset: You think about technology not as a cost center, but as the core driver of business value. You operate with the relentless urgency, strategic foresight, and ownership mindset required to build an enduring legacy, motivated by a significant equity stake.
