Director of Software Engineering

A rapidly growing proprietary trading firm is seeking a Head of Trading Technology to lead the development of its next-generation, low-latency trading infrastructure.

This is a hands-on technical leadership position with ownership of the architecture and delivery of a greenfield trading platform supporting both traditional and digital-asset markets. The platform will cover the full trading lifecycle, including market-data ingestion, exchange connectivity, pricing, order and execution management, smart routing, risk, and infrastructure.

The successful candidate will lead and mentor a team of software engineers, platform engineers, and architects while remaining actively involved in system design, critical code reviews, performance optimization, and complex technical problem-solving.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end architecture and delivery of a high-performance, low-latency trading platform.
• Lead the greenfield development of market-data, connectivity, execution, pricing, routing, and risk systems.
• Establish the technical strategy and make key architectural decisions across the trading stack.
• Remain hands-on by writing and reviewing critical code and resolving complex latency, throughput, and performance issues.
• Lead, grow, and mentor a high-performing engineering organization.
• Set development priorities, establish timelines, manage dependencies, and ensure the delivery of production-quality systems.
• Drive continuous improvements in latency, throughput, reliability, scalability, and operational resilience.
• Partner closely with traders, quantitative researchers, infrastructure engineers, and business stakeholders.
• Introduce AI-assisted development practices that improve engineering workflows, tooling, testing, and delivery.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards covering testing, CI/CD, monitoring, observability, security, and production support.
• Identify and mitigate technical, operational, and delivery risks.

• At least 10 years of software-engineering experience, including five or more years in a technical leadership position.
• Leadership experience within a proprietary trading firm, hedge fund, market maker, investment bank, exchange, or similarly demanding trading environment.
• Proven hands-on experience building or optimizing high-performance, low-latency trading systems.
• Strong programming ability in C++, Rust, or another high-performance systems language.
• Experience with multithreading, concurrency, distributed computing, networking, and performance optimization.
• Strong understanding of the complete electronic-trading lifecycle, including market data, pricing, order management, execution, risk, positions, and clearing.
• Demonstrated success managing and mentoring engineers in a fast-paced, production-critical environment.
• Ability to establish priorities, manage timelines, and deliver complex technical initiatives.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to make sound decisions in ambiguous situations.
• Willingness to remain technically engaged while leading the broader engineering function.

Preferred Experience

• Background within high-frequency trading, electronic market making, systematic trading, or quantitative finance.
• Experience building trading infrastructure across equities, futures, commodities, derivatives, digital assets, or other high-frequency markets.
• Experience developing systems that connect to multiple exchanges, venues, or liquidity sources.
• Knowledge of real-time market-data processing, smart order routing, automated execution, pricing, and risk.
• Exposure to on-chain trading, decentralized finance, or tokenized real-world assets is helpful but not required.
• Experience creating new trading platforms or replacing legacy trading infrastructure.