Senior Settlement & Trading Operations Engineer

zerohash • Chicago, NY

13d

About The Position

zerohash is looking for a Senior Settlement & Trading Operations Engineer to help drive the operations behind our global value transfer infrastructure. This is a hands-on role with real ownership: you'll spend part of your week resolving the most complex settlement and trading breaks yourself, and acting as a subject matter expert for your peers — coordinating the day-to-day, mentoring your colleagues, and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. We power crypto and fiat for some of the largest financial and consumer brands in the world, around the clock. That means precision matters, tooling matters, and judgment matters. You'll write SQL & Python, dig through transaction logs, and coordinate releases with Product and Engineering — but you'll also be the person a newer teammate turns to when a sweep looks wrong at 6pm, and the responsible party to keep operations steady when the team lead is out. If you like the combination of financial operations, engineering, and quietly keeping a complex machine running, this is a role with a lot of surface area.

Requirements

• 5–8 years in financial operations, settlement, payments, or a related technical back-office role, including some experience mentoring or leading others.
• Strong Python. Able to write, debug, and maintain scripts independently, including data manipulation, error handling, and REST API integration.
• Strong SQL. Comfortable with multi-table joins, subqueries, CTEs, and window functions against large datasets.
• Hands-on with AI tooling. Regular use of AI-assisted tools (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or similar) for writing code, investigating problems, and producing documentation.
• API fluency. Solid understanding of API design and experience using tools like Postman against production financial systems.
• Attention to detail. Experience in environments where errors carry financial consequences, and the disciplined habits to prevent them.
• Clear communication. Able to explain a technical issue clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Finance, Economics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

• Crypto, stablecoin, or digital asset experience is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own daily settlement and trading operations.
• Oversee end-to-end processing of crypto and fiat movements — deposits, withdrawals, internal transfers, and sweeps — so that everything settles accurately and inside its window.
• When something stalls, you're the one who figures out why and spearheads the solution.
• Run reconciliations that actually reconcile.
• Perform multi-way checks across internal ledgers, bank and custodian statements, and partner float files.
• Track down the discrepancies, explain the "why" behind each break, and drive it to a clean number rather than a close-enough one.
• Manage the trade lifecycle.
• Keep trading activity flowing correctly from execution through settlement, and handle the occasional exception — a correction or adjustment — safely and idempotently when it comes up.
• You're comfortable operating in production, and you know when to pause and double-check before making a change.
• Get to the bottom of things.
• Chase failed transfers, mismatched balances, and stuck flows — writing SQL against production tables and reading distributed transaction logs to find what actually went wrong.
• Capture what you learn in runbooks so the team's procedures and readiness keep improving as we scale.
• Automate the repetitive work.
• Write and maintain Python that takes on reconciliations, participant liquidations, and other recurring tasks, so the team spends less time on manual steps and turns work around faster.
• Support partner go-lives and asset listing.
• Stress-test new features and new asset listings in lower environments, run through go-live validation with partners, and give Product and Engineering the operational feedback that only shows up when you actually run the system.
• Work with AI tooling.
• We use LLMs day to day — to draft and debug scripts, spot anomalies in settlement data, and get documentation written faster.
• You already work this way, and you can help the rest of the team get more out of these tools.
• Report on operational health.
• Build and maintain the dashboards and data models that show leadership how transactions, liquidity, and operational performance are trending — and flag the things worth worrying about before they become incidents.
• Be a technical point of contact for institutional partners.
• Help resolve complex transaction inquiries and API integration questions, translating between what the partner is seeing and what's actually happening in our systems.
• You'll participate in the team's on-call rotation and share responsibility for off-hours coverage.

Benefits

• Healthcare Insurance: zerohash covers roughly 100% of employee premiums as well as a portion of spouse/children (U.S. only)
• Vision & Dental Insurance (U.S. only)
• Chance to earn equity
• Maternity & Paternity leave (after 6 months)
• WeWork All Access Membership
• WFH Yearly Stipend
• L&D Yearly Stipend (after 6 months)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior