Senior Software Engineer

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer (Core Trade)

Contract Duration: 6 months

Location: New York/Hybrid (3 days in the office, 2 days remote)

Hourly Rate: $60 - $100 per hour

The Role:

• Be a core part of a high-performing engineering team at the heart of a global fintech platform, one that settles millions of trades daily across stocks, ETFs, funds, fixed income, and options.
• Take full ownership of new Java services from whiteboard to production, setting the technical direction and raising the bar for the team around you.
• Hunt down latency and throughput bottlenecks and fix them. You'll be expected to understand the problem at the machine level, not just the application layer.
• Partner closely with traders, quants, risk managers, and compliance teams, translating between the trading floor and the codebase.
• Keep a close eye on live systems, dig into data when something looks wrong, and be the person who finds the root cause before it becomes an incident.
• Help shape the platform that lets investment partners around the world offer fractional share ownership and seamless trading to their end clients.
• Thrive in an environment that moves with startup energy but operates with institutional precision, three days a week in NYC with the people calling the shots.
• Bring curiosity about AI tooling and a drive to use it to ship better work, faster.

Skills Needed:

• At least five years building low-latency, high-throughput systems in Java, this is the foundation everything else rests on.
• A genuine command of Java concurrency, multithreading, and the JVM, including how garbage collection behaves under pressure and how to tune it.
• A track record of writing tests that actually catch bugs, unit and integration both.
• Comfort working close to the metal, you understand how the OS and network layer affect your application.
• Hands-on experience with messaging infrastructure such as Kafka, Aeron, JMS, or similar. Knowledge of the FIX protocol is a real advantage.
• Exposure to Docker or Podman, PostgreSQL, and AWS will stand you in good stead, though not essential.
• The ability to communicate clearly with non-engineers, you can explain a complex technical decision to a trader or a compliance officer without losing them.

Research indicates that men will apply to a role when they meet only 50-60% of the requirements, while women and other underrepresented groups often look for a 90-100% match. If this role excites you but you don't tick every single box, please still apply. We'd love to hear from you.