Engineering Manager, Trading Platform

Topstep

8d•$190,000 - $230,000

About The Position

Topstep is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a team in its Trading Platform organization, which builds and operates TopstepX. The platform includes order flow and execution, market data, and supporting services and integrations—real-time systems relied on daily by thousands of funded traders, where availability, performance, and correctness are critical. This is a people-leadership role accountable for the team's reliability, quality, delivery, and day-to-day health. The manager will partner with senior engineers, other engineering leads, Product, and operations. Occasional hands-on work is welcome but not expected. Topstep's working environment ranges from fully remote to hybrid and emphasizes collaboration, including cameras on during meetings and communication through Slack. The position offers a base salary range of $190,000–$230,000 and eligibility for a performance-based bonus. Compensation may vary based on internal compensation structure, geographic region, job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and other factors.

Requirements

At least 7 years of software engineering experience, including production systems, integrations, and operations.
At least 2 years of engineering management experience, including hiring, setting direction, coaching and developing engineers across levels, and shaping team operations and delivery.
Demonstrated delivery of complex technical work at quality while balancing feature delivery, reliability, and technical investment.
Experience leading teams responsible for production systems, including on-call, incident response, and reliability.
Track record of building inclusive, collaborative cultures based on psychological safety, agency, and continuous learning.
Technical credibility to guide architecture and trade-off decisions for backend and distributed systems; high-availability, real-time, or event-driven services and API integrations are especially relevant.
Hands-on background with .NET/C# and distributed systems, as well as AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences, ability to advocate for the team's needs, and ability to work effectively with engineering and business peers.
Data-informed approach to team health, delivery, and reliability, with sound judgment about what to measure.
Comfort leading through shifting priorities and balancing team capacity against business needs.

Nice To Haves

Experience in trading, fintech, or other regulated financial environments; futures or trading-platform experience is a plus.
Experience with high-availability, low-latency, or real-time systems.
Experience with microservices and real-time messaging such as WebSocket or SignalR.
Cloud operations, infrastructure, and on-call experience.
Experience with CI/CD tooling such as Argo CD or GitHub Actions.

Responsibilities

Set the team's direction and standards, establish hiring expectations, run interviews, plan capacity, and shape the team's day-to-day operations.
Lead and develop engineers through 1:1s, real-time feedback, performance reviews, individualized coaching, and early action on performance issues.
Build a team culture grounded in psychological safety, transparency, agency, and high standards.
Be accountable for the availability, performance, and resilience of the team's systems and for engineering processes, on-call health, incident follow-through, observability, and tooling.
Oversee the team's delivery cadence and outcomes, and influence the roadmap to include necessary technical investment and reliability work.
Collaborate with senior engineers, other engineering leads, Product, peer Engineering Managers, operations, and infrastructure partners.
Keep leadership informed about progress, risks, and trade-offs.
Guide architecture and trade-off decisions for backend and distributed systems; occasional hands-on work is welcome but not expected.