Application Programming Interface (API), Business Growth, Cloud Computing, Computer Science, Concurrency, Data Modeling, Data Processing, Data Storage, Distributed Computing, Ecosystems, Engineering, High Throughput, Identify Issues, Incident Response, Java, Large-Scale Systems, Memory Management, Messaging Technology, Microservices, Performance Tuning/Optimization, Production Support, Production Systems, Requirements Management, Scalable System Development, Software Engineering, Stock Market, System Architecture, Systems Engineering, Technical Leadership, Technical/Engineering Design, Transaction Processing/Management
Title: Staff Software Engineer
Location: Chicago, IL (Hybrid)
About the Role
You will help drive the evolution of a cloud-native, scalable platform that powers critical financial market infrastructure and transaction processing systems. This includes expanding platform capabilities, improving resiliency, and ensuring scalability as the business continues to grow.
This role is designed for a technical leader who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, has deep expertise in distributed systems and microservices architecture, and can deliver production-grade software that operates at scale with reliability and precision.
What You'll Do
- Help architect, implement, and maintain core platform infrastructure, collaborating with engineering teams on system design and technical direction.
- Provide technical leadership and hands-on contributions to architecture, frameworks, protocols, and data models, ensuring solutions meet performance, reliability, scalability, and maintainability requirements.
- Design and implement key features across a distributed microservices ecosystem supporting mission-critical business workflows.
- Build scalable data processing and storage solutions capable of handling large volumes of real-time and historical data.
- Partner with product, business, and engineering stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions and drive execution.
- Participate in production support and incident response activities, including troubleshooting complex distributed systems issues.
What You'll Bring
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems.
- Expert-level Java proficiency, including concurrency, memory management, JVM internals, and performance optimization.
- Proven experience designing and operating highly scalable, high-throughput, low-latency systems in production environments.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture, messaging patterns, APIs, and event-driven design.
- Experience working within complex, highly regulated, or mission-critical technology environments is highly preferred.