VP of Engineering, Trade

About the Role
zerohash is hiring a VP of Engineering to lead our Trade organization, the team responsible for the trading technology that powers execution, liquidity, and market access across our platform. As zerohash scales, we're looking for a leader with deep, hands-on trading systems expertise, a proven track record building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations, and the presence to represent trade engineering at the leadership table. We believe the best engineering leaders are technologists first, with a product and business mindset, who seek outsized impact across the company.

Candidates must be located within a 1-hour driving radius of one of our main office hubs (Chicago, NYC, UK/Amsterdam for EMEA).

Responsibilities

Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for zerohash's trade organization, and align it with company strategy and the roadmaps of the transact, tokenize, and core teams

Build, lead, and scale a multi-team organization - hiring, developing, and retaining engineering managers, principal/staff engineers, and individual contributors as the team grows

Act as the executive owner of trading systems reliability, performance, and risk, including matching engines, order/execution infrastructure, market data, and FIX connectivity

Partner directly with the CTO, SVP Engineering, product leadership, and zerohash's other VP(s) of Engineering to set org-wide technical standards, priorities, and engineering culture

Represent engineering to company leadership and key partners/clients on matters related to trading technology

Recruit, coach, and develop engineering managers and senior technical talent; build durable career paths for the team

Partner with Compliance, Risk, and Legal to ensure trading systems meet the regulatory requirements relevant to zerohash's markets

Drive build-vs-buy, technical debt, and architecture trade-off decisions at an organizational level

Stay technically credible, engage deeply enough in system design and code-level decisions to earn the trust of senior engineers and maintain competency with the codebase and system architecture

Requirements

15+ years of software design and development experience, with deep hands-on background in backend and distributed systems

8+ years of engineering leadership experience, including managing managers and senior/principal/staff engineers

Proven track record building and scaling engineering organizations (30+ engineers) at a high-growth fintech, trading firm, exchange, or crypto company

Experience owning multi-team technical strategy and roadmap at a VP, Director, or Head of Engineering level

Prior exposure to fast-growth startups and comfort operating with ambiguity

Exceptional executive communication skills

Strong cross-functional partnership skills with Product, Compliance, Risk, and Legal

Cloud computing experience, with AWS highly desirable

BS or MS in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience

Strong bias toward serving your team and stakeholders, with a growth mindset

Domain Knowledge

Solid understanding of market structure, order types (Limit, Market, Stop, IOC, FOK), trade lifecycle, and common risks associated with electronic trading

Familiarity with regulatory requirements relevant to trading systems (e.g., MiFID II, Reg NMS)

Deep Understanding of Trading Systems

10+ years of hands-on experience developing, deploying, and maintaining high-performance, low-latency trading systems (e.g., central limit order books (CLOBs), matching engines, market data feeds)

Proven experience with FIX Protocol (4.2 and higher) and implementing highly reliable FIX Gateway solutions

High-Throughput / Low-Latency Development

Expertise in highly concurrent, multi-threaded, low-garbage/zero-garbage code in languages commonly used in finance such as C++, Rust, or Go

Demonstrable experience optimizing system performance to achieve single-digit microsecond latency

Core Financial Infrastructure

Strong background building and managing mission-critical backend systems such as trade booking systems, high-throughput accounting/ledger systems, and real-time credit/risk limit systems

Experience with distributed system

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