Driver
S. Kattel
Base
Kathmandu, NP
Remote
Yes
Relocation
Open
Open to new roles

SamirKattel

Backend Engineer, Trading Systems

3+ years of backend engineering, 2 of them building quantitative trading infrastructure in Python, TypeScript and Go: market-making engines quoting 30+ pairs across 13 venues, multi-venue exchange gateways, and the Kubernetes control plane running 50+ live bots.

The Imola circuit in its 1994 layout, split into three coloured sectors, one for each role: QubitGlobal, TokenPilot and LancemeUp. A dove marks Tamburello, where Ayrton Senna was killed on 1 May 1994. S1 S2 S3 Ayrton Senna, 1960-1994. Killed at Tamburello, 1 May 1994. SENNA · 1.5.1994

Backend systems should be like Formula 1 cars: relentlessly optimized, precisely engineered, and safe enough to push to the limit.

Race history

Three stints · 2023 to present

  1. S1 · Current Oct 2024 → now

    Backend Engineer

    QubitGlobal / Quantitative Trading and Analytics · Dubai, UAE (remote)

    • Replaced fixed-spread quoting with an async grid market maker in Python on the GLFT model, extending Avellaneda-Stoikov: half-spreads skew with live inventory to cut adverse selection and pull position back to flat. Live on 30+ pairs across 10+ venues.
    • Made spreads adaptive by estimating volatility, order-flow intensity and book depth online at 1,000 quote updates per second, removing roughly 10 manual re-tunes per week.
    • Cut new-venue onboarding from 3 days to 1 by moving the FastAPI gateway to hexagonal architecture, where each adapter (Bybit, BitMart, MEXC) owns its REST and WebSocket clients, normalizer and error mapping, including binary protobuf decoding.
    • Guaranteed exactly-once accounting across 100+ restarts with zero drift, on Redis-backed state and TimescaleDB persistence, plus fail-stop startup reconciling orders and balances against exchange truth in 20 seconds.
    • Ran every client account from one process by multiplexing public and private authenticated streams across 13 venues, staying alive through broker outages behind a per-exchange circuit breaker that sheds rather than buffers.
    • Cut bot rollout from 15 to 30 minutes down to 30 seconds with a Go control plane provisioning workloads via the Kubernetes API, a per-bot Go sidecar supervisor, a NATS control bus using wildcard subjects for per-bot addressing, RBAC, and a reconciler loop converging cluster state to desired state. 50+ bots live.
    • Made environments reproducible with Terraform on DigitalOcean, including the single static egress IP that exchange API key allowlisting depends on, so every client account routes through one whitelisted origin.
    • Delivered the predecessor TypeScript engine behind one connector interface, with Redis-backed state and SSE streaming.
  2. S2 Jan 2024 → Sep 2024

    Backend Developer

    TokenPilot / Digital Asset Liquidity and Market Making · Singapore (remote)

    • Integrated order management, market data and reconciliation across 10+ centralized exchanges including Binance, Bybit, MEXC, Gate.io, KuCoin and XT at 100,000 orders per day, handling rate limits, request signing and depth parsing.
    • Handled live-flow failure modes: stale price detection, partial fill reconciliation, duplicate-request guards and local-versus-venue state drift.
    • Built scheduled Python profit-and-loss, exposure and fill-rate reporting for 20 client accounts, plus a Telegram bot for position alerts.
  3. S3 Jun 2023 → Nov 2023

    Backend Intern

    LancemeUp / Kathmandu

    • Built REST and GraphQL APIs with NestJS, PostgreSQL and TypeORM plus a WebSocket layer for live updates, deployed with Docker, nginx and PM2.

Fastest lap

Spreads that retune themselves on a thousand quote updates a second

The engine estimates volatility, order-flow intensity and book depth online, then skews its half-spreads against live inventory. It replaced fixed spreads, and it replaced the engineer who used to retune them ten times a week.

Lap deltas

Before and after, measured in production

Quote updates
1,000/s
Orders handled
100k/day
Pairs quoted
30+
Venues connected
13
Bots in cluster
50+
Restarts, no drift
100+
Startup reconcile
20s

Garage

Built outside work hours

GharBhada

Django · Next.js · PostgreSQL · PostGIS · Celery · nationwide rental platform

ghar-bhada.com →
  • Built a 19-source scraping pipeline behind a plugin registry, normalizing heterogeneous HTML from 3,000+ listings into one canonical schema with URL and image dedup.
  • Designed geospatial search on H3 hex indexing at resolutions 7 to 9 with PostGIS map clustering, powering map-bounds queries and locality pages generated from cell aggregates.
  • Used weighted PostgreSQL full-text search instead of Elasticsearch, and self-hosted geocoding behind a fallback chain to commercial providers.
  • Shipped a saved-search alert engine with push, Telegram and Discord delivery, idempotent and deduplicated, running on Celery beat alongside scraping, cleanup and backup jobs.
  • Hardened the platform with Firebase and JWT auth, Turnstile bot gating, upload content-type validation, per-endpoint rate limiting, and automated Postgres backups to Cloudflare R2.

ITCH FPGA

SystemVerilog · Python · NASDAQ ITCH 5.0 decoder and order book

github.com/probablysamir/itch-fpga →
  • Built a byte-serial hardware decoder for NASDAQ TotalView-ITCH 5.0, covering 9 message types and 98% of session traffic.
  • Designed the framer with dual length-source cross-checking, plus a direct-mapped order book with collision detection and price-ladder occupancy tracking.
  • Verified against Python reference models on real session captures: 264M+ messages byte-identical, zero frame errors, zero length mismatches.

Chunk Store

Go · distributed backup utility

github.com/probablysamir/chunk-store →
  • Splits large files into AES-256-GCM encrypted, SHA-256-verified chunks across multiple cloud providers, with round-robin allocation and manifest-based reassembly.

Debrief

Writing, newest first

Parsing NASDAQ ITCH on an FPGA

7 August 2026 · Medium

Read →

How I used Zero-Copy To Achieve Blazingly Fast File Transfers

6 August 2025 · Medium

Read →

Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling

17 December 2023 · Medium

Read →

Setup sheet

Highlighted entries are the daily drivers

Languages
PythonTypeScriptGoSQLSystemVerilog
Backend
asyncioFastAPIDjangoNode.jsNestJSNext.jsReactCeleryRabbitMQNATSRedisWebSocketsprotobufhexagonal architecture
Data
PostgreSQLTimescaleDBPostGISH3 geospatial indexingfull-text searchMongoDB
Infrastructure
KubernetesDockerTerraformDigitalOceanAWSLinuxnginxCI/CD
Domain
Market makingGLFT and Avellaneda-Stoikov quotingInventory riskExchange connectivityOrder lifecycle and reconciliation

Paddock

Reply within a day, most days

Hiring for trading infrastructure?

Happiest close to the exchange: quoting logic, connectivity, reconciliation, and the control plane that keeps it all running. Kathmandu-based, working remote with a Dubai desk today, open to relocation.

BSc Computer Science and Information Technology
Madan Bhandari Memorial College, Kathmandu, 2026

AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate
Amazon Web Services, 2026