Staff Software Engineer
paul murphy associatesChicago (IL)
Staff Software Engineer
Posted today
paul murphy associatesChicago (IL)
SENIORITY
Lead
About the role
Title: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL or New York, NY – HybridFull-time
You will help drive the evolution of low-latency, high-throughput applications, focusing on exchange and clearing systems. This includes expanding the platform's features, ensuring its scalability, and meticulously maintaining performance. This role is designed for a technical leader who thrives on solving the “hard problems” in financial markets, has deep expertise in low-latency systems, and can help architect financial technology that operates with microsecond precision at scale, while maintaining the highest standards of financial integrity.
Responsibilities:
- Help architect, implement, and maintain the core exchange and clearing infrastructure, ensuring the system is performant, scalable, and ultra-reliable.
- Provide technical leadership and hands-on contributions to system design patterns, frameworks, protocols, and data architectures, ensuring they meet the requirements for performance, reliability, correctness, and maintainability.
- Utilize Aeron and Hydra frameworks to build ultra-low-latency and high-throughput messaging architectures that power the core of their infrastructure.
- Handle massive data volumes efficiently, designing storage and retrieval patterns for market data, trade history, positions, and audit trails.
- Collaborate with the Product team and other stakeholders to design technical solutions for new, innovative financial products.
- Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents requiring deep technical troubleshooting.
- What you’ll bring
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.5-8 + years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time building high-performance distributed systems.
- Strong Java proficiency, including solid understanding of concurrency, memory management, JVM behavior, and performance optimization.
- Understanding of network protocols and APIs, with experience implementing REST and WebSocket APIs.
- FIX protocol experience.
Experience building scalable and HA systems that handle high throughput and low latency in production environments (10k+ msgs/sec, low-millisecond latencies).Experience building micro-services systems, Kafka and relational databases (PostgreSQL).Experience with derivative contracts (futures, options) and financial markets
Experience with Low latency messaging frameworks is a strong plus.
Before you apply
Applying takes about a minute. These four things decide how fast it moves after that.
Your profile is current
It's what we read first. Occupations, seniority and locations matter more than a long history.
Two examples you can talk through
Not a portfolio — just two pieces of work where you can explain the decisions and what you'd change.
A number in mind
What you're on now and what would make you move. We negotiate better when we know both.
Your notice period
Employers plan around it, and it's the question that stalls offers most often.
Once you apply, someone reads it and calls you before anything reaches the employer — usually within two working days.