About the role

As a Senior Specialist Software Engineer you will help drive the development of our cloud based scalable architecture that powers our instrument management, settlements engine and clearing systems. You will work closely with Staff Engineers on architectural decisions while taking full ownership of significant components and features.

This role is designed for an experienced engineer who thrives on solving complex technical problems in financial markets, has strong expertise in micro services based distributed systems, and can deliver production-quality code that operates at scale with reliability and precision.
What you'll do

• Contribute to the technical design and architecture of Rothera's core instrument management, exchange and clearing infrastructure, collaborating with other engineers on system design decisions.
• Design and implement significant features and components across a distributed micro services architecture for instrument management, settlement calculation, and clearing workflows.
• Implement customer facing API interfaces using FIX, REST, and WebSocket protocols for programmatic access.
• Build robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Kafka for event streaming, Postgres for persistent state, and in-memory data structures for hot path processing.
• Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into technical implementations and execute.
• Continuously improve system performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Participate in on-call rotations and respond to production incidents requiring deep technical troubleshooting.

What you'll bring

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time building high-performance distributed systems.
• Strong Java proficiency, including solid understanding of concurrency, memory management, JVM behavior, and performance optimization.
• Understanding of network protocols and APIs, with experience implementing REST and WebSocket APIs. FIX protocol experience is a strong plus.
• Experience building scalable and HA systems that handle high throughput and low latency in production environments (10k+ msgs/sec, low-millisecond latencies).
• Experience building micro-services systems, Kafka and relational databases (PostgreSQL).
• Experience with derivative contracts (futures, options) and financial markets is highly desirable.

Benefits & Compensation

This position has a base salary of $150,000-$175,000 per year.

Rothera is dedicated to advancing the careers and personal wellbeing of our team members. We are continuously exploring ways to support our employees holistically, including a 401(k) plan with employer match, health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and eligible dependents, paid time off, and much more.
Why you should join the mission

If you want a critical role in a path-breaking company, you belong here.

This is a full-time, in-person hybrid position. This position is not available for visa sponsorship now or in the future. Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. on a permanent, indefinite basis.