Senior Engineering Specialist (Low Latency)

About the role

Rothera is building the premier prediction market in partnership with Robinhood and Susquehanna International Group. The Senior Engineer will contribute to the technical design and architecture of Rothera's core exchange and clearing infrastructure, collaborate with other engineers on system design decisions, and implement significant features and components within the matching engine, order management systems, and clearing workflows.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the technical design and architecture of Rothera's core exchange and clearing infrastructure, collaborating with other engineers on system design decisions.
• Design and implement significant features and components within the matching engine, order management systems, and clearing workflows.
• Utilize Aeron and Hydra frameworks to build ultra-low-latency and high-throughput messaging architectures that power the core of our infrastructure.
• Implement customer-facing API interfaces using FIX, REST, and WebSocket protocols for programmatic access.
• Build robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Kafka for event streaming, Postgres for persistent state, and in-memory data structures for hot path processing.
• Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into technical implementations and execute.
• Continuously improve system performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents requiring deep technical troubleshooting.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.
• 5+ 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.
• Experience with Hydra, Aeron or other low latency messaging frameworks is a strong plus.
• Understanding of network protocols and APIs, with experience implementing REST and WebSocket APIs. FIX protocol experience is a strong plus.
• Experience building 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 is highly desirable.

Benefits & Compensation

This position has a base salary of $150,000-$175,000 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.