Staff Software Engineer (Margin & Risk) - Prime Engine

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap for margin and risk across asset classes, including portfolio margin, intraday margining, options risk, real-time exposure limits, margin-call automation, and margin models for new asset classes.
• Design and build services that turn complex margin methodologies and regulatory rules into correct, testable, and observable systems, and keep those rules consistent where asset classes interact.
• Lead real-time risk enforcement on the order path, balancing latency against accuracy and safety.
• Drive reliability and performance across the team’s services: throughput, state recovery, database load, and failure isolation.
• Partner with Product, Brokerage Operations, Compliance, and adjacent engineering teams (order management, ledger, account, market data) to define behavior and integration boundaries.
• Set the standard for correctness in a financial system: transactional integrity, idempotency, reconciliation, feature flags, and staged rollouts.
• Lead design reviews, mentor senior and mid-level engineers, and raise the engineering bar as the team grows.
• Act as a technical point of escalation for production margin and risk issues, and drive durable prevention after incidents.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems experience. Evidence of scope and ownership matters more than a strict year count. Strong preference for someone who has owned the same consequential production system for at least two years.
• Proven ownership of a high-volume system where a defect could cause financial loss, a data-integrity failure, or an inappropriate customer restriction.
• Experience designing and shipping transactional, low-latency, high-throughput systems.
• Strong expertise in Go, or deep experience in Java, C++, or Rust and a clear willingness to work primarily in Go. Domain knowledge matters more than prior time in Go.
• Deep knowledge of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred), transactions, consistency, and concurrency.
• Experience with event-driven and service-oriented systems (gRPC or other RPC, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar) and with Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated care for correctness: testing strategy, edge-case analysis, reconciliation, and safe production rollout.
• Clear communication with engineers and with operations and compliance partners, including when the business rules are complex or still being defined.
• Track record of technical leadership and mentorship across teams. Curious about the core of the domain, and effective as a teammate.

Preferred Skills

• Hands-on margin or risk experience in more than one asset class, with derivatives or recently launched markets especially valuable.
• Familiarity with margin methodologies such as Reg T, portfolio margin, options spread margin, or futures margin.
• Background in brokerage, clearing, exchange, ledger, payments, or settlement systems.
• Experience with options, derivatives, or multi-leg strategies and their risk characteristics.
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) for long-running processes such as margin-call lifecycles.
• Experience with observability and production performance tuning.
• Experience leading migrations or refactors in production-critical environments.