Low-Latency Execution Intern

Time Seventeen; Hong Kong; On-site; HKD 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Job summary

Time Seventeen in Hong Kong seeks a software engineer focused on low-latency trading systems. You will work with engineers to optimize execution-system performance, measure latency, and ensure robust risk controls in time-sensitive workflows.

Responsibilities include profiling feed handlers, building replay tools, and validating changes with latency distributions, throughput, and correctness checks while preserving order-state integrity.

Qualifications

• Strong programming fundamentals in C++, Rust, Go, Python, or similar.
• Basic understanding of operating systems, networking, concurrency, and data structures.
• Interest in trading systems and market microstructure.
• Familiarity with Linux and profiling/benchmark tools is helpful.

Responsibilities

• Instrument market-data and execution paths and establish repeatable latency measurements.
• Build replay or simulation tools for message handling and order-state transitions.
• Profile CPU, memory, serialization, network, and queueing behavior to identify bottlenecks.
• Test reconnects, sequence gaps, duplicate messages, cancellations, and partial failures.
• Evaluate changes using latency distributions, throughput, and correctness checks.
• Document benchmark environments and explain the tradeoffs behind proposed optimizations.
• Use controlled workloads and suitable timing methods to compare changes, investigate measurement noise, and report tail latency alongside throughput and resource usage.

Skills

C++

Rust

Go

Python

Programming fundamentals

Tools

Linux

Profiler tools

Job description

About Time Seventeen

We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events.

About Time Seventeen

We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events.

The world contains a large class of risks that determine where capital flows yet have no price today. Global supply chains are being reconfigured, while the geopolitical discount rates that inform consequential decisions remain difficult to quantify. Time Seventeen is building tradable synthetic indices and term structures for these risks.

Time Seventeen is infrastructure for geopolitical risk and catastrophe risk. We give risk a price. We create state prices for tail events. Our ambition is to turn fragmented judgments about individual events into continuous risk prices, then bring those prices into institutional valuation, trading, and risk-transfer workflows.

Our work connects event definitions, probabilistic forecasting, market data, index methodology, and execution infrastructure. We explore how prediction markets, actuarial models, insurance and reinsurance structures, and blockchain-based DeFi can contribute to a common language for uncertain outcomes. The challenge is to make risk legible across different horizons, exposures, and market participants, while keeping assumptions and limitations explicit.

Building this infrastructure requires more than a compelling forecast. Data must be traceable, events must have defensible resolution rules, methodologies must survive scrutiny, and products must account for liquidity, basis risk, operational resilience, and applicable legal constraints. We want institutions to be able to understand a risk price, challenge its construction, and assess how it relates to the exposure they actually hold.

We are building a focused team across research, engineering, markets, and risk. We value people who can move between deep specialist work and the practical decisions needed to build a company: identifying the important question, testing an approach, communicating the evidence, and carrying the result into a usable system.

About The Role

Research and improve execution-system performance, learning how market data, order state, and risk controls interact in time-sensitive workflows.

You will work with engineers on the systems that ingest market information and coordinate execution. The emphasis is on measurement and correctness: identifying where time is spent, understanding how state changes during failures, and preserving safeguards while improving performance.

Projects may include profiling a feed handler, building a replay harness, evaluating network behavior, or analyzing order lifecycle events. You will learn to distinguish average latency from tail latency and to assess whether a change improves the system under realistic load.

What you'll do

• Instrument market-data and execution paths and establish repeatable latency measurements.
• Build replay or simulation tools for message handling and order-state transitions.
• Profile CPU, memory, serialization, network, and queueing behavior to identify bottlenecks.
• Test reconnects, sequence gaps, duplicate messages, cancellations, and partial failures.
• Evaluate changes using latency distributions, throughput, and correctness checks.
• Document benchmark environments and explain the tradeoffs behind proposed optimizations.
• Use controlled workloads and suitable timing methods to compare changes, investigate measurement noise, and report tail latency alongside throughput and resource usage.

What we're looking for

• Strong programming fundamentals in C++, Rust, Go, Python, or another relevant language.
• Basic understanding of operating systems, networking, concurrency, and data structures.
• Interest in trading systems and market microstructure.
• A careful approach to measurement and reproducible experiments.
• Coursework or projects that show you can debug complex technical behavior.
• Familiarity with Linux and a profiler or benchmark tool is helpful; prior professional trading or low-latency engineering experience is not required.

What success looks like

• Produce a repeatable benchmark or replay tool with a documented measurement method.
• Identify and validate a specific performance improvement or reliability finding.
• Show that changes preserve order-state correctness and required controls.

Location & working arrangement

This role is based in Hong Kong. Please share your availability, current location, and any academic or scheduling requirements.

How we work

Time Seventeen is a focused, high-ownership team. We value clear thinking, direct communication, careful execution, and people who carry important work through to a result. We expect colleagues to surface inconvenient evidence, ask precise questions, and make the limits of their work explicit. Strong specialist judgment matters, as does the willingness to understand how your work affects research, markets, engineering, and risk. We prefer useful documentation and clear decisions to unnecessary process.