Sr. Trading Platform Operations Specialist

Topstep

8d•$140,000 - $165,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Sr. Trading Platform Operations Specialist improves how the Trading Platform organization operates by building scalable processes, driving automation, and coordinating cross-functional operational programs. Reporting to the Trading Platform Operations Lead, this role partners across engineering, product, support, and operations to turn manual work into repeatable systems, establish operational standards, and improve how teams work together as the organization grows. With visibility across the platform organization, the Sr. Trading Platform Operations Specialist identifies cross-team dependencies, operational bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement that individual teams cannot see on their own. The role owns key operational programs—including release coordination, reporting, documentation, onboarding, and process automation—ensuring the organization operates efficiently, delivers reliably, and continues to scale.

Requirements

5+ years in technical operations, release management, program management, or platform operations, including end-to-end ownership of operational systems or processes.
Experience managing workflows, releases, and versioning across Jira or similar tools, with automation experience strongly preferred.
Proven ability to coordinate releases across engineering, QA, and product — you know where releases stall and keep handoffs moving without being asked.
Track record of turning ad hoc processes into durable systems: runbooks, automations, and standards that outlast any single release.
Strong written communication — your release notes, runbooks, and status updates leave no follow-up questions.
Sound judgment on what to decide directly versus escalate, with the organizational skills to manage competing priorities across multiple release trains.
Demonstrated experience identifying manual operational work and replacing it with automation using scripting, APIs, AI tools, workflow automation platforms, or similar technologies.
Comfortable in a remote, Slack-heavy async environment.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with trading, fintech, brokerage, or another regulated environment is a plus — exposure to exchange operations or reporting (CME or similar) especially so.
Experience driving change within startup environments.

Responsibilities

Partner with Engineering Managers to drive releases from code complete to production, ensuring engineering, QA, and product handoffs stay on track with no silent stalls.
Lead release operations by consolidating readiness signals, risks, defects, and dependency status into a clear go/no-go view for release stakeholders.
Partner with Engineering Managers to manage cross-team dependencies, identify sequencing risks, and inform scope and ship-date decisions.
Own release communications, including release notes and recurring release summaries for product, support, and leadership.
Partner with engineering, product, support, and operations leaders to design and operate cross-functional initiatives where success depends on execution rather than technical implementation.
Design and run operational programs that make teams across the department more effective — scoping the goal, standing the program up, and owning it through to a measurable result.
Embed each program into the way teams already work (release, testing, onboarding, and support workflows) so it sticks rather than becoming overhead, and keep it running smoothly as the organization grows.
Track and report the platform org's operational KPIs and run the reporting cadence leadership relies on.
Maintain the data hygiene and metric definitions that keep reporting accurate as the org scales into more release trains.
Run recurring exchange and operational reporting reliably (such as CME reports).
Manage the automation backlog: build the quick wins yourself, spec the larger projects for engineering.
Turn tribal knowledge into durable documentation, runbooks, and self-service workflows that reduce operational dependency on individuals and improve onboarding.
Continuously analyze operational bottlenecks and use metrics to prioritize process improvements and automation investments.