Staff Software Engineer
About The Position
Topstep is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to serve as a technical leader for their trading platform. This role involves addressing cross-team engineering challenges to design and build systems for real-time trading, market data delivery, and brokerage integrations. The engineer will work primarily with a modern .NET stack, building cloud-native services for high-throughput workloads, and occasionally contribute to the React/TypeScript frontend. Responsibilities include shaping architectural decisions, establishing engineering standards, ensuring platform scalability, and owning systems end-to-end from design to production operations. This position is ideal for individuals with deep technical expertise, the ability to navigate ambiguity, and a balance between robust systems and evolving business needs. The role also involves contributing to technical strategy, mentoring engineers, and defining engineering excellence at Topstep.
Requirements
- 8 + years of software engineering experience building and shipping production systems at scale.
- Deep proficiency in C# and the .NET ecosystem, with a track record of designing production services used across multiple teams.
- Experience designing service boundaries and API versioning in a microservices or modular architecture.
- Extensive experience building distributed, high-availability systems, including asynchronous, event-driven communication between services (e.g., message queues, pub/sub, or streaming).
- Deep database experience with PostgreSQL or SQL Server, including schema design, query optimization, and transactional behavior.
- Experience with observability tools and distributed tracing in production environments.
- Proven track record of owning production systems, including debugging and incident response.
- Experience with container technologies (Docker) and cloud platforms (AWS)
- Strong testing mindset with practical experience across unit, integration, and system testing.
- Excellent problem-solving skills, with the ability to debug complex issues across multiple systems.
- Demonstrated ability to build consensus and drive complex technical initiatives across teams without relying on direct authority.
- Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to both engineering and product stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Kubernetes experience (EKS or equivalent), Helm, or GitOps (ArgoCD) tooling.
- Experience with React, TypeScript, or other modern frontend frameworks.
- Experience with real-time client comms (SignalR/WebSockets).
- Background in high-throughput, low-latency systems, including performance tuning across multiple services.
- Incident leadership (RCA, remediation follow-ups).
- Previous work in financial services, fintech, or other compliance-regulated environments.
- Understanding of trading systems, market data, or brokerage operations.
Responsibilities
- Design and build services and APIs that power core trading platform capabilities.
- Own initiatives end-to-end, from technical design through production deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
- Collaborate with product and design to translate user needs into scalable, maintainable technical solutions.
- Contribute to system architecture decisions, establishing patterns and practices that other teams can follow.
- Write clean, well-tested code with strong focus on reliability, performance, and operational excellence.
- Participate in on-call rotations, respond to incidents, and drive continuous improvement of system reliability.
- Build and maintain observability into your systems through metrics, logging, and distributed tracing.
- Occasionally work across the stack, contributing to the React/TypeScript frontend as features require.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing sessions, and sharing knowledge about system design and best practices.
- Balance technical debt against feature delivery, making thoughtful trade-offs based on business priorities and technical constraints.
- Strengthen engineering culture through documentation, tooling improvements, and process refinements.
Benefits
- Seven Company-paid Holidays
- generous Family Leave
- Paid time off is front-loaded
- Competitive 401(k) matching
- health, dental, and vision insurance
- bonus for taking 5 consecutive days of vacation
- Employee referrals are bonused
- food and groceries budget
- contributes towards health and wellness
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
