Staff Software Engineer

Paul Murphy Associates · Chicago, IL
Work typeHybrid · Full Time
Pay · estimate~$120k – $165kMarket rate · not set by employer
PostedNov 13, 2026
LevelSenior
In short You will help drive the evolution of low-latency, high-throughput applications, focusing on exchange and clearing systems.
JAVA

📋 About the job

LocationChicago, IL or New York, NY – Hybrid

Title: Staff Software Engineer

Full-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 stron…
📄 Read the full description → The rest of this listing is on the hiring partner’s site.
Interested in this role?Apply in one click — no JobQ account needed.
Apply now →
Staff Software EngineerPaul Murphy Associates
Apply now