Latency Lead, HFT – Build Zero-to-Measure Latency in Austin

Doghouse Recruitment; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 114,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Travel ~2 trips/year

Job summary

Doghouse Recruitment's client, a proprietary market maker, is building an Austin latency center and hiring a Lead Latency Engineer to own the vision, measurement, and improvements from the ground up. This founding US role requires hands-on technical leadership across systems, data, and hardware.

You will define baselines, craft a measurable latency roadmap, and drive continuous improvements with developers, infrastructure, and performance teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in performance-critical systems, ideally with deep latency ownership.
• Hands-on experience with American exchange connectivity, specifically equities and futures, in the context of latency monitoring and optimization.
• Strong Linux performance tuning and low-latency networking, hands-on enough to specify and validate kernel-bypass and NIC work.
• Solid C++, with hardware-aware instincts (cache hierarchy, false sharing, branch prediction, memory ordering).
• The judgment to read a latency profile, find the real bottleneck, and decide when to tune, when to redesign and when to spend on hardware.
• Comfort working in a matrix rather than a hierarchy: this role has a small management component, mostly guiding others on how to approach latency problems.

Responsibilities

• Build tick-to-trade monitoring essentially from scratch: there is limited monitoring today, no dedicated tooling and no specialized hardware in place, so you will define the baselines the firm measures itself against.
• Turn those findings into a clear latency vision and a prioritized roadmap, with every priority justified by data rather than assumption.
• Drive a continuous stream of measured latency improvements in close collaboration with development, infrastructure and performance: the C++ hot path with development, the network and hardware path (kernel bypass, NIC tuning, colocation) with infrastructure, and measurement and tuning with performance.
• Specify latency requirements for colocation, time-sync, NIC and hot-path changes, and validate their real-world impact with your own measurements.
• Lead latency design reviews for new systems, and raise the wider team's ability to read and act on latency data, treating stakeholders as if they are new to it.
• Scope the case for FPGA and SmartNIC offload on the hottest paths together with hardware specialists; this work has not started yet, and you would be the one to get it moving.
• Work across a stack that blends third-party software, specialized hardware and custom-built components: you don't need to write everything yourself, but you need to understand it deeply enough to develop and configure it.

Skills

Performance-critical systems

Low-latency networking

C++

Linux tuning

Hardware-aware instincts

Latency monitoring

Tools

Kernel bypass

SmartNIC offload

Job description

Doghouse Recruitment's client, a proprietary market maker, is building an Austin latency center and hiring a Lead Latency Engineer to own the vision, measurement, and improvements from the ground up. This founding US role requires hands-on technical leadership across systems, data, and hardware.

You will define baselines, craft a measurable latency roadmap, and drive continuous improvements with developers, infrastructure, and performance teams.