Staff Software Engineer, Trading Platform - Charts

About the role

The Staff Software Engineer will help build a custom charting engine for the TopstepX trading platform. The library is designed to render real-time charts for thousands of active traders, with a focus on performance, smooth interaction, and a well-defined public API.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core systems of the charting engine — rendering primitives, domain features, and the public API.
• Own the framework-agnostic core library architecture, including the React binding and the React Native binding.
• Drive architectural decisions on canvas compositing, layer strategy, and main-thread vs. worker-thread boundaries.
• Define and uphold rendering performance standards across the engine — 60fps frame-budget discipline and pointer-interaction responsiveness under continuous data flow.
• Build the data integration layer that bridges the existing real-time data pipeline into the charting engine.
• Ensure charting engine is consistent and performant across a wide range of devices, from desktop to tablets to mobile.
• Establish visual testing standards including pixel diffing, deterministic replay-based tests, and golden-image regression discipline.
• Lead architectural reviews and RFCs for the charting library, driving consensus on library architecture across the trading platform without direct authority.
• Mentor engineers on the charting team through code reviews, design reviews, pairing, and technical coaching.
• Balance technical debt with feature delivery based on long-term library health and consumer needs.
• Communicate technical direction, trade-offs, and risk clearly to engineering peers and platform leadership.

Requirements

• 8 + years of frontend engineering experience building and shipping production systems.
• Prior experience building or contributing to a production charting library, data visualization framework, or comparable interactive rendering system.
• Working knowledge of financial markets — OHLCV, tick data, and futures conventions — sufficient to make informed product and architectural trade-offs.
• Deep proficiency in TypeScript including strict mode, advanced generics, and designing public APIs that other engineers consume.
• Production experience with frontend graphics rendering, particularly Canvas 2D — multi-layer compositing, dirty-region rendering, and text metrics.
• Production experience with Web Workers and SharedArrayBuffer — zero-copy data pipelines, typed-array views over shared memory, Atomics for generation counters, and off-main-thread compute architecture.
• 2D math fluency — coordinate transforms, viewport projection, and hit testing.
• Discipline around visual testing — pixel diffing, deterministic replay-based tests, and willingness to write and maintain them.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.

Qualifications and Key Competencies

• Deep proficiency in React, including production experience designing component libraries, hooks APIs, or framework binding layers.
• Production experience with real-time streaming systems — WebSocket lifecycle, backpressure, reconnection, and replay.
• React Native, react-native-skia, expo-gl, or JSI experience.
• Order flow and market microstructure knowledge — footprint charts, volume profile, DOM, cumulative delta.
• MessagePack or protobuf experience for binary serialization on the data pipeline.
• WebGL2 experience — for a possible future high-density rendering layer.
• WebGPU / WGSL experience (long-term migration target).
• Rust + WASM experience (the indicator compute layer is the most likely candidate for a Rust rewrite).
• PineScript or other charting DSL familiarity (for transpiler/runtime work in a later phase).
• Open source contributions to graphics, charting, or financial libraries.

Benefits

This role comes with a competitive base salary range of $200,000 – $250,000, with the possibility of a performance-based bonus. The company offers a variety of perks including seven paid holidays, generous family leave, vacation bonuses, and health, dental, and vision insurance. Employees also receive a food and groceries budget and contribute towards health and wellness. Topstep fosters a collaborative culture with cameras on during meetings and a robust Slack environment for communication.

Schedule

The role is available on a full-time basis, with the option to work remotely or in a hybrid model.

Pay

The compensation offered will take into account internal compensation structure and may vary depending on the candidate's geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience among other factors.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Topstep is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where all employees and applicants are valued. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or veteran status, in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.