Low-level C++ Engineer - HFT build

Overview

One of the most successful market making firms in the world is building a new US equities and ETF business from the ground up, and hiring the founding engineering team behind it. Genuine greenfield: no legacy code, no inherited constraints, and the core architecture still to be set by the people who join now. The firm trades on 100+ exchanges globally, is consistently profitable across market conditions, and is investing heavily to lead US equities the way it already leads elsewhere.

The culture is flat and fast: small teams own problems end to end, decisions happen at the desk, and code ships in days. Engineers sit with the traders and researchers they serve, so impact is immediate.

Responsibilities

• Build core components of a new low-latency equities and ETF platform across market data, order management and execution.
• Drive latency out of the critical path at every level, from memory layout to the networking stack, where success is measured in nanoseconds.
• Work directly with FPGA engineers to push performance-critical logic into hardware.
• Develop deep expertise in US market microstructure and exchange connectivity, and shape the systems that trade against it.
• Partner with traders and researchers to turn trading ideas into robust production systems, and help set technical direction for a platform the business will rely on for the next decade.

Qualifications

• 3+ years working with strong modern C++ and a real instinct for performance: profiling, cache-aware design, concurrency, and getting the most from the hardware.
• A background building the internals of serious systems - any of: operating systems and kernels, compilers and runtimes, distributed systems, database or storage engines, file systems, embedded or real-time systems, networking, or hardware acceleration.
• Comfort close to the metal: kernel bypass and RDMA, driver and firmware work, GPU or accelerator kernels, or low-level optimization in another demanding domain.
• No trading or finance experience required - the firm would rather teach markets to an exceptional systems engineer than the reverse.
• Commercial instinct, the ambition to build and own things, and the humility to do it collaboratively. Heads-down solo engineers aren't the fit; elevating the people around you is.
• Elite problem-solving and CS fundamentals, typically from a strong track record at a leading technology, chip, or systems company, or an equivalent record of building hard things well.