Staff Software Engineer, Trading Platform - Charts

Topstep

13h•$200,000 - $225,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Topstep is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to develop a custom charting engine for the TopstepX trading platform. This role involves creating a framework-agnostic library for real-time charts, focusing on rendering pipelines, performance, and API design. The work includes managing overlapping rendering layers (candles, grid, indicators, positions, drawings), real-time data integration, indicator math, drawing tools, and the public API. The engineer will also build and maintain React bindings, with React Native bindings to follow. A potential WebGL layer for higher-density visualizations may be added later. The core library is framework-independent, with bindings acting as thin wrappers. This position is ideal for an experienced engineer who has previously shipped production charting or visualization libraries, understands UI performance under continuous data flow, and has strong API design principles. The role involves setting performance benchmarks, creating abstractions for other engineers, and defining engineering excellence for this initiative.

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.
Deep proficiency in React, including production experience designing component libraries, hooks APIs, or framework binding layers.
Production experience with frontend graphics rendering, particularly Canvas 2D — multi-layer compositing, dirty-region rendering, and text metrics.
Demonstrated performance discipline for 60fps real-time rendering — Chrome profiler fluency, frame-budget analysis, and the ability to keep pointer-driven interactions smooth while data flows continuously in the background.
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.
Track record of architecting libraries with public APIs that consumers integrate against without leaking implementation details.
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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

Design and build core systems of the charting engine — rendering primitives (layer system, hit testing, dirty-region rendering, text measurement) and domain features (drawing tools, indicator math).
Own the framework-agnostic core library architecture, including the public API that React, React Native, and direct consumers integrate against.
Build and maintain the React binding — the thin wrapper layer that adapts the core's public API into framework-native components, hooks, and lifecycle integration. The React Native binding follows as the mobile app matures.
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.