---
title: 'Network Engineer at Nascent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/network-engineer-nascent-canada-y8544z6v9f1g'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Network Engineer at Nascent

- **Company:** Nascent
- **Location:** Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/nascent/72958837-1656-4f01-aec0-93855ae98083

## Job description

The Opportunity You'll own the network infrastructure that connects Nascent's trading systems to exchanges, colocations, and internal platforms — the physical and logical fabric that every microsecond of execution depends on. This is a hands-on build-and-operate role: you'll design low-latency network topologies, manage colocation cross-connects and exchange connectivity, maintain precision time synchronization, and keep firewall and routing policy tight. You'll work alongside systems engineers, SREs, and quant infrastructure teams who treat deterministic performance as a first-class engineering discipline. This isn't a ticket-queue seat inside a large NOC. You'll be one of two network engineers with direct ownership over architecture decisions, vendor relationships, and the tooling you build to monitor and automate the stack — designing connectivity from scratch, not just maintaining what someone else built. The problems are real: packet captures at the switch port, PTP drift investigations, firewall policy reviews that directly affect trade flow — and you'll have the autonomy to solve them end to end. This position must be geographically located within +/- 3 hours EST.

## Responsibilities

- Own colocation connectivity: cross-connects, exchange feeds, and carrier relationships across production colo facilities.
- Design and maintain low-latency L2/L3 network topologies for trading infrastructure.
- Configure, troubleshoot, and optimize BGP and OSPF routing in production.
- Maintain precision time synchronization (PTP / IEEE 1588) across trading and infrastructure systems.
- Manage firewall policy (Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, or equivalent) — changes that directly affect production traffic paths.
- Write Python tooling for network automation, configuration management, and operational monitoring.
- Perform packet capture and protocol-level troubleshooting (tcpdump, Wireshark).
- Build and maintain runbooks, network diagrams, and infrastructure documentation.
- Participate in the on-call rotation and own incidents end to end, from triage through post-mortem.

## About you

- You've worked in latency-sensitive, colocation, or trading environments — you understand why microseconds matter and how network decisions land on execution.
- You design infrastructure from scratch rather than only operating what someone else built.
- You script your way out of repetitive work; automation is instinct, not an afterthought.
- You own incidents end to end — you don't escalate and wait, you dig in until it's resolved.
- You're comfortable as one of two network engineers: small team, real ownership, nowhere to hide.
- You treat on-call as part of the craft, not an imposition.
- You translate network decisions into language systems engineers, SREs, and quant teams can act on.

## Preferred experience

- 3+ years hands-on with L2/L3 networking in latency-sensitive, colocation, or trading environments.
- Strong working knowledge of BGP and OSPF — configuration, troubleshooting, and design in production.
- Production experience with PTP (IEEE 1588) or comparable precision time synchronization.
- Proficiency in Python for network automation, configuration management, or operational tooling.
- Hands-on firewall configuration and management (Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, or equivalent).
- Packet capture and protocol-level troubleshooting (tcpdump, Wireshark).
- Nice to have: CCNP/CCIE with practical work behind it; IaC for network config (Ansible, Terraform); hybrid-cloud connectivity (AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute); DPDK or kernel-bypass exposure.

## About Nascent

Founded in 2020, Nascent exists to build, expand, and capture opportunity, in open markets and permissionless technologies. Building from a base of permanent capital, we deploy assets across a range of both liquid and long-term strategies that ensure we are among the most active users of the open financial system we are helping to build. We’ve backed [100+ early-stage teams](https://www.nascent.xyz/portfolio) that we believe can change markets and expand what’s possible. At Nascent, we combine that venture + market pedigree with product-grade engineering to turn research into revenue: experiments that ship fast, are evaluated rigorously, and move P&L. We focus on models, low-latency infrastructure, and resilient systems that compound performance over time.

## Our Team & Culture

We’re an interdisciplinary team of engineers, quants, and operators who treat skill-building like a sport. The culture is competition + curiosity: push to win, share learnings, and iterate publicly through red-teams, internal games, and post-mortems. Autonomy isn’t a perk — it’s how we ship. Principles that drive our team & work

- Compete to win
- Explore, experiment, play
- Always be building
- Seek and speak truth
- Own your shit.

## What We Offer

- The opportunity to learn, experiment and build in an entrepreneurial environment
- Remote-first, distributed team with frequent in-person sprints and retreats.
- Competitive total comp with strong bonus upside tied to performance.
- Hardware & home-office stipend, conference and learning budgets.
- Comprehensive health benefits (medical/dental/vision), life insurance.
- Open vacation policy as well as flexible work hours and location
- 16 weeks fully-paid parental leave + supported return to work.
- Retirement matching, open vacation policy, flexible hours.

We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome diverse perspectives.

## About Nascent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Nascent is a collective of builders, investors, and traders deploying permanent capital into liquid markets and early-stage crypto ventures to build the infrastructure of an open financial system.
- **Entity Type**: Private (bootstrapped with permanent capital; no external funding rounds disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Dan Elitzer (Co-Founder), Josh Felker (Co-Founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry**: Financial Services – crypto trading, venture investing, and market making.
- **Target Customers**: Internal trading desks, portfolio companies (50+ early-stage crypto teams), and the broader crypto ecosystem as a liquidity provider.
- **Mission/Purpose**: "Build, expand, and capture opportunity in open markets and permissionless technologies."

## Products & Services
Nascent operates as a hybrid organization with two main verticals:
- **Proprietary Trading (Nascent Markets)**: Algorithmic and systematic trading across liquid crypto markets, focusing on microstructure, latency, and repeatable edge. Operates as a high-performance trading desk.
- **Venture Investing (Nascent.xyz)**: Early-stage venture investments in 50+ crypto/blockchain startups, deploying both liquid and long-term strategies from a base of permanent capital.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private; no disclosed valuation).
- **Key Metric**: Total portfolio of 50+ venture investments; 46 employees (+45.7% YoY headcount growth as of 2025 [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nascentxyz)).
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Nascent is self-funded via permanent capital; no external investors. Partnerships include portfolio companies (e.g., Uniswap, Atomic.Finance) and exchanges where they provide liquidity.
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid headcount expansion (46 employees, up from ~30 in 2024), active hiring across engineering, operations, and research roles, and a distributed team operating in 5 countries (US, Canada, Cayman Islands, UK, Denmark).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Permanent Capital Base**: Unlike traditional VC or hedge funds, Nascent uses permanent capital, allowing long-term conviction and patience without fund lifecycle pressure.
- **Tiny, Autonomous Teams**: 2-pizza squads with end-to-end ownership and day-0 access to models, data, and compute. Decision SLA <24 hours with a default-yes bias.
- **Dual Focus**: Combines high-frequency trading expertise with venture investing, creating a feedback loop between market microstructure insights and early-stage deal flow.
- **Culture of Competition & Curiosity**: Heavy emphasis on games, prediction markets, and skill-building as a sport. "Show, don't tell" hiring philosophy.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale the Trading Operation**: Continue building low-latency trading systems and expanding into new liquid markets.
- **Deepen Venture Portfolio**: Back more early-stage crypto founders building primitives for an open financial world.
- **Agentic Infrastructure**: Invest in AI agents and internal LLM infrastructure for research, ops, and risk (as seen in recent job postings).
- **Global Talent Distribution**: Expand the distributed team while maintaining a strong cultural core (remote-first, +/-3h EST time zone).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Autonomy**: "Own your shit" mentality – real ownership from day one, with direct P&L impact. Flat hierarchy and high agency [nascent.xyz/careers](https://www.nascent.xyz/careers).
- **Remote & Flexible**: Distributed team; work from anywhere with a preference for time zones overlapping US Eastern. No fixed vacation policy – take time off as needed.
- **Benefits**: 16 weeks paid parental leave, $1,000 home office setup (no laptop cap), $200/month internet stipend, $2,000/year health & wellness stipend, full coworking coverage, annual performance bonus, and 401(k) matching (US) [nascent.xyz/careers](https://www.nascent.xyz/careers).
- **Learning & Development**: Unlimited L&D budget for courses, conferences, and skill-building. Heavy focus on upskilling, internal games, and retreats.
- **Engineering Culture**: Modern stack (Rust, Python, Kubernetes, AI agents); engineers own full lifecycle from design to production. Small teams, big impact [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nascentxyz).

## Sources
1. [nascent.xyz](https://www.nascent.xyz/)
2. [nascent.xyz/careers](https://www.nascent.xyz/careers)
3. [nascentmarkets.xyz](https://www.nascentmarkets.xyz/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/nascentxyz](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nascentxyz)

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