Lead Software Developer – Options Market Making

Job summary

Design and develop a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine for real-time market management. Optimize the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce latency and maximize throughput while managing quote lifecycles and exchange connectivity.

Job details

Position Overview: We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Software Developer to design, build, and optimize the core technology behind real-time option quote management across U.S. equity options markets. The candidate must have a proven track record and hands-on experience in the following areas: Design and develop a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine capable of maintaining large numbers of simultaneous two-sided quotes across symbols, strikes, expirations, and exchanges. Build efficient quote lifecycle management, including new quote creation, quote replacement, quote and mass quote cancellation, quote refresh, and quote re-entry. Implement intelligent quote prioritization, throttling, and backpressure handling when exchange or internal message-rate limits are reached, including per-venue rate budgets, burst controls, quote aging policies, cancel/replace prioritization, and graceful degradation under peak market-data or volatility events. Apply strong knowledge of U.S. options market microstructure and exchange matching engine, gateway behavior, including quote-entry protocols, session management, acknowledgments, rejects, recovery, and venue-specific latency, throughput, and throttling constraints. Develop high-performance C++ components using lock-free and low-contention data structures, cache-aware data layouts, efficient CPU/core utilization, NUMA awareness, kernel and network-stack optimizations, and high-performance IPC. Profile and tune the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce gateway latency and maximize sustained throughput, including exchange session connectivity, serialization/deserialization overhead, batching trade-offs, TCP/UDP/network-stack behavior, pacing logic, queue depth monitoring, latency distribution analysis, and elimination of latency spikes, synchronization bottlenecks, and throughput constraints. Must haves 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in options electronic market making, with a strong focus on end-to-end quote lifecycle management. Strong understanding of CPU architecture, memory hierarchy, caching, concurrency, networking, and Linux performance. Demonstrated experience building low-latency, high-throughput, multithreaded systems. (Highly preferred) Knowledge of the inner workings of one or multiple US equity option exchanges

What you’ll do

Design and develop a high-performance, event-driven options quoting engine for real-time market management. Optimize the full quote-to-exchange path to reduce latency and maximize throughput while managing quote lifecycles and exchange connectivity.

Requirements

Requires 5+ years of professional software engineering experience in options electronic market making. Must possess strong expertise in C++, low-latency system design, and deep knowledge of U.S. options market microstructure.

Listed skills

• C++ · Preferred

Other relevant skills

Identified from the job description. Confirm important requirements above.

• C++
• Options market making
• Low-latency systems
• High-throughput systems
• Multithreading
• Linux performance
• CPU architecture
• Memory hierarchy
• Concurrency
• Networking
• Market microstructure
• Lock-free data structures
• NUMA awareness
• Kernel optimization
• Network-stack optimization
• Distribution Analysis
• Back Pressure
• Management
• C++ (Programming Language)
• Protocol Stack
• Microarchitecture
• Serialization
• Data Structures
• Linux
• Equities
• Event-Driven Programming
• Fault Tolerance
• Market Data
• Market Maker
• Memory Hierarchy
• Software Engineering
• Lifecycle Management
• Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
• Prioritization
• Low Latency
• API Throttling
• Deserialization

Job areas

• Technology
• Software
• Finance & Accounting
• Engineering
• Data & Analytics
• Lead Software Developer
• Software Developer / Engineer
• Software Developers

More jobs from Squarepoint