Lead Software Developer – Options Market Making

Squarepoint Capital • Montreal, QC

16h

About The Position

We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Software Developer to design, build, and optimize the core technology behind real-time option quote management across U.S. equity options markets. The candidate must have a proven track record and hands-on experience in designing and developing a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine capable of maintaining large numbers of simultaneous two-sided quotes across symbols, strikes, expirations, and exchanges. This includes building efficient quote lifecycle management, implementing intelligent quote prioritization, throttling, and backpressure handling, and applying strong knowledge of U.S. options market microstructure and exchange matching engine behavior. The role involves developing high-performance C++ components and profiling and tuning the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce latency and maximize throughput.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in options electronic market making, with a strong focus on end-to-end quote lifecycle management.
• Strong understanding of CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, caching, concurrency, networking, and Linux performance.
• Demonstrated experience building low-latency, high-throughput, multithreaded systems.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of the inner workings of one or multiple US equity option exchanges

Responsibilities

• Design and develop a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine capable of maintaining large numbers of simultaneous two-sided quotes across symbols, strikes, expirations, and exchanges.
• Build efficient quote lifecycle management, including new quote creation, quote replacement, quote and mass quote cancellation, quote refresh, and quote re-entry.
• Implement intelligent quote prioritization, throttling, and backpressure handling when exchange or internal message-rate limits are reached, including per-venue rate budgets, burst controls, quote aging policies, cancel/replace prioritization, and graceful degradation under peak market-data or volatility events.
• Apply strong knowledge of U.S. options market microstructure and exchange matching engine, gateway behavior, including quote-entry protocols, session management, acknowledgments, rejects, recovery, and venue-specific latency, throughput, and throttling constraints.
• Develop high-performance C++ components using lock-free and low-contention data structures, cache-aware data layouts, efficient CPU/core utilization, NUMA awareness, kernel and network-stack optimizations, and high-performance IPC.
• Profile and tune the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce gateway latency and maximize sustained throughput, including exchange session connectivity, serialization/deserialization overhead, batching trade-offs, TCP/UDP/network-stack behavior, pacing logic, queue depth monitoring, latency distribution analysis, and elimination of latency spikes, synchronization bottlenecks, and throughput constraints.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed