Senior Software Engineer

Job Title: Senior Software Engineer (Core Trade) Contract Duration: 6 months Location: New York/Hybrid (3 days in the office, 2 days remote) Hourly Rate: $60 - $100 per hour The Role: Be a core part of a high-performing engineering team at the heart of a global fintech platform, one that settles millions of trades daily across stocks, ETFs, funds, fixed income, and options. Take full ownership of new Java services from whiteboard to production, setting the technical direction and raising the bar for the team around you. Hunt down latency and throughput bottlenecks and fix them. You'll be expected to understand the problem at the machine level, not just the application layer. Partner closely with traders, quants, risk managers, and compliance teams, translating between the trading floor and the codebase. Keep a close eye on live systems, dig into data when something looks wrong, and be the person who finds the root cause before it becomes an incident. Help shape the platform that lets investment partners around the world offer fractional share ownership and seamless trading to their end clients. Thrive in an environment that moves with startup energy but operates with institutional precision, three days a week in NYC with the people calling the shots. Bring curiosity about AI tooling and a drive to use it to ship better work, faster. Skills Needed: At least five years building low-latency, high-throughput systems in Java, this is the foundation everything else rests on. A genuine command of Java concurrency, multithreading, and the JVM, including how garbage collection behaves under pressure and how to tune it. A track record of writing tests that actually catch bugs, unit and integration both. Comfort working close to the metal, you understand how the OS and network layer affect your application. Hands-on experience with messaging infrastructure such as Kafka, Aeron, JMS, or similar. Knowledge of the FIX protocol is a real advantage. Exposure to Docker or Podman, PostgreSQL, and AWS will stand you in good stead, though not essential. The ability to communicate clearly with non-engineers, you can explain a complex technical decision to a trader or a compliance officer without losing them. Research indicates that men will apply to a role when they meet only 50-60% of the requirements, while women and other underrepresented groups often look for a 90-100% match. If this role excites you but you don't tick every single box, please still apply. We'd love to hear from you. #J-18808-Ljbffr