Director, Staff Engineer (Low Latency)

About the role

You will help drive the evolution of our 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.

What you'll do

• Help architect, implement, and maintain Rothera's 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 our 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.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent building high-performance, low-latency distributed systems.
• Expert-level Java proficiency, including deep understanding of concurrency primitives, memory management, JVM internals, and performance optimization techniques.
• Experience with Hydra, Aeron or other low latency messaging frameworks.
• Proven experience building systems at scale that handle high message throughput (100k+ msgs/sec), low latency (sub-millisecond p99), and high availability (99.99%+ uptime).
• Experience with financial markets technology and understanding of order books, matching algorithms, and derivatives products.

Benefits & Compensation

This position has a base salary of $175,000-$200,000 per year. Rothera Markets is dedicated to advancing the careers and personal wellbeing of our team members. We are continuously exploring ways to support our employees holistically, including a 401(k) plan with employer match, health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and eligible dependents, paid time off, and much more.

Schedule

This is a full-time, in-person hybrid position with an expectation to be on-site Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Pay

The base salary for this role is $175,000-$200,000 per year.

Qualifications

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. on a permanent, indefinite basis.