Sr. Software Engineer II, Exchange Connectivity
Senior software engineer building and maintaining low-latency exchange connectivity, market data handlers, and order gateways for a leading trading platform. Requires 8+ years trading industry experience with C++ or Rust.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and support exchange connectivity components across multiple asset classes and protocols
- Develop and maintain market data handlers, order gateways, and contract/instrument reference data processors
- Create APIs to expose exchange services to the broader organization via REST, WebSocket, event bus, or other mechanisms
- Collaborate closely with the Trading OMS, FCM, and infrastructure teams
- Optimize for low latency, high throughput, and fault tolerance across all trading and data flows
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in the trading industry, ideally with C++ or Rust
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field
- Proven experience building exchange connectivity and market data systems across multiple venues
- Strong understanding of network programming, multicast UDP, TCP, and asynchronous I/O
- Deep knowledge of trading industry specifications (FIX, SBE, market data formats, etc.)
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, including the ability to mentor others and drive change across teams
- Experience supporting live trading systems in production — diagnosing connectivity issues, latency anomalies, and failover events
- Strong sense of ownership, with the ability to deliver robust, tested, and observable software in mission-critical environments
Nice-to-Haves
- Capital markets experience
- Performance profiling and tuning using perf, VTune, Wireshark, or similar tools to analyze and reduce latency
- Low-latency systems development with deep experience optimizing for performance, throughput, and determinism in production trading environments
- Building and maintaining real-time feed handlers for exchange protocols (ITCH, OUCH, FIX/FAST, CME MDP, Eurex ETI, etc.)
- Familiarity with U.S. and international exchange APIs and connectivity protocols (CME, ICE, Eurex, CBOE, Binance, etc.)
- Expert-level Linux knowledge, including performance tuning, kernel parameters, NUMA, and clock synchronization (PTP)
- Building resilient distributed systems that handle failover, recovery, and state synchronization
- Expertise in concurrency, multi-threading, and asynchronous programming
- Familiarity with IBM MQ for exchange data transfer
- Experience with low-latency networking, kernel bypass, or FPGA acceleration
Compensation & Benefits
- Salary range: $140,000-$190,000 USD
- Annual target bonus of 10%
- 401(k) plan with up to 3.5% company match
- 18 days PTO per year + 7 paid holidays
- Health, Vision, Dental Coverage
- Life and Disability Insurance Covered 100% by NinjaTrader
- Paid Parental Bonding Leave
- 1 Service Day Annually
Skills
C++, Rust, Fix, Sbe, Multicast Udp, Tcp, Asynchronous I/O, Market Data Handlers, Order Gateways, Low-Latency Systems, Linux, Concurrency, Multi-Threading, Network Programming
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