Staff Software Engineer (Java)

Company Name: tastytrade
Role: Staff Software Engineer (Java)

The tasty family of companies empowers individual investors and traders by providing educational media, intuitive and powerful trading software, high-speed order execution, competitive pricing, and innovative financial products. The diversity of our offerings and the technology which powers them provide our engineers with exposure to a broad set of tools and the opportunity to dig deep into specific problems. We are an ideal environment for those who are self-motivated, engineering-focused, pragmatic, and who truly enjoy creating and operating large, highly-available, and performant systems. Our team is lean and our management philosophy values the autonomy of our people.

At tastytrade you’ll be part of the team that builds out the retail brokerage business and supports our other business initiatives. We care about the speed and stability of our back-end systems as much as we care about the experience our customer-facing applications create. Our architecture is consistently evolving as our business grows and we face different technical challenges, but always with a focus on practicality and performance. In this role you’ll take point on the cross-platform Java library we use to power our trading platforms and play a significant role in the evolution of multi-platform development.

Who you are:

• The ability to learn quickly in areas in which you don't already have deep expertise and a proven track record of continually covering new technical ground over your career as a software engineer.
• A mastery of Java (mandatory), Kotlin (preferred but must be willing to learn), strong experience with a multi-platform mobile framework (React Native, Kotlin Multiplatform, etc.), and the ability / willingness to deploy and manage production systems built using these in a production context.
• The ability to evaluate a new framework or language for fit with a specific problem domain and to quickly set patterns for appropriate usage of new technology.
• 10+ years of professional experience working as a software engineer on a team with experience as a technical lead or mentor.
• Actively engineers complex solutions, is not an "armchair architect".
• Deep understanding of computer science fundamentals, hardware-level and network-level performance considerations.

What you'll do:

• Work primarily in Java / Kotlin on the library that powers our front-end trading client applications.
• Provide overall technical leadership for the engineering team, setting technical direction for the evolution of tastytrade’s client applications, providing input on large scale technology shifts or adoptions of new tools, and identifying critical paths forward.
• Provides leadership for more junior members of the team by both leading small project teams and providing general technical guidance to the team at large.
• Provide concise, constructive, and thoughtful peer reviews for both more junior engineers as well as for other senior engineers. Your peer reviews will cover general codecraft, quality of implementation and overall business domain correctness.
• Interact directly with the tastytrade business, product, and UX / CX teams to capture and translate requirements and technical direction into production-quality code.
• Evaluate and build proof of concept implementations leveraging new technology or novel architecture in order to spike a path for new projects.
• Write comprehensive tests for your code.

Team Perks:  

• Performance Bonuses  
• Stock Purchase Options  
• 401k Plan  
• 20 Paid Vacation Days (plus an additional paid vacation day the month of your birthday!)  
• 10 Paid Sick Days  
• Gym Membership Reimbursement  
• Commuter Benefits  
• Pet Insurance  
• Wellness & Mental Health Programs  
• Charitable Donation Matching  
• Two Paid Volunteer Days Off  
• Daily catered lunch when in the office  
• Full kitchen with snacks and beverages  
• In-building gym  
• CTA stop a block away, Shuttle to/from Metra  
• Office located in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars 

About Us: 
The tasty house of brands empowers individual traders differently. tastylive, founded in 2011, is an online financial media network, tastytrade (previously known as tastyworks) is a self-directed retail brokerage firm that launched in 2017, tasty Software Solutions and tastyfx, is a registered Forex broker-dealer. In 2021, London-based IG Group acquired tastylive, Inc. (previously known as tastytrade) and assigned it to lead business in North America. tastyfx is the fastest-growing forex broker in the US over the past few years. Changing the IG US name to tastyfx marks the next chapter, in aligning with the tasty brand family and offering a more forex-focused experience. This combined team has years of experience like institutional brokers, but also a passion for disrupting the entire trading industry.     

Our dream is simple: we want more people to find more success with a better trading experience. That’s why we’re investing heavily in the right people, technology, and media to make that happen in the US and across the globe.    

Location: Our office is in the West Loop - Chicago's growing center of tech, great cuisine, and high-end bars.  

tastytrade | tastylive  | tastyfx  
1330 W Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607    

*Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they have every single qualification. Our team is dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles!