Senior Backend Engineer II (Team Lead) - US Stocks

Overview

Lead the technical direction, design and delivery of the US Stocks squad's backend for trading US stocks, while staying hands-on in the code. This is a technical lead role, not a people management role.

What you'll do

• Lead the technical design for your squad's features, write design documents and run design reviews.
• Break down epics into clear tasks, give realistic estimates and keep delivery on track, unblocking engineers when needed.
• Stay hands-on: build the most critical and complex parts of the system yourself.
• Set and uphold code quality standards through code review, testing practices and coding guidelines.
• Make correctness the first rule of the squad: accurate money and quantity handling, idempotent requests, safe retries and audit trails.
• Lead integrations with US brokerage and custody partners, including reconciliation of our records with theirs.
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis for your squad's services, and drive lasting fixes.
• Manage technical debt openly and negotiate trade-offs with Product and the Engineering Manager.
• Coach and mentor engineers in the squad and help them grow technically.
• Work with the Engineering Manager, Staff Engineers and Architecture on technical direction across teams.
• Design and implement Smart Order Routing (SOR) logic or multi-venue execution strategies to optimize fill rates and latency across different Liquidity Providers (LPs) and exchanges.
• Define and enforce strict API contracts and WebSocket streaming standards between the backend trading engine and the frontend/mobile teams to ensure real-time UI responsiveness.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience.
• 6+ years of professional backend engineering, including 1+ year leading a squad or project technically.
• Highly proficient in Java, Go or another modern backend language.
• Strong in microservices, event-driven design, reliability and observability, with a record of writing and defending design documents.
• Solid experience with relational databases (query tuning), Kafka and Redis.
• Experience running services on cloud platforms (GCP or AWS) with CI/CD.
• Able to plan and deliver work with a team, give clear technical direction and mentor engineers, without needing formal authority.
• Ownership mindset and clear communication.

Nice to have

• Experience in brokerage, trading, payments, cross-border money movement or another regulated environment.
• Direct experience integrating with modern API-first brokerage platforms (e.g., Alpaca, DriveWealth, Interactive Brokers) or crypto exchanges.

Details

• Fully remote work arrangement; the benefits section lists a hybrid work arrangement with the option of working from the office.
• Team spans Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia.
• Partners with Product, Operations, Compliance and US brokerage partners.