Low Latency (Java) Developer

Paul Murphy Associates; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Paul Murphy Associates seeks a senior engineer to drive cloud-based scalable architecture powering instrument management, settlements, and clearing systems.

You will own significant components, work with Staff Engineers on architecture decisions, and deliver production-quality code for high-throughput financial markets.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of professional software engineering with distributed systems experience.
• Strong Java proficiency including concurrency and JVM behavior.
• Experience with low-latency messaging frameworks is a strong plus.
• Understanding of REST and WebSocket APIs; FIX experience is a plus.
• Experience building scalable, high-throughput, low-latency production systems.
• Knowledge of derivative contracts and financial markets is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to design and architecture of core instrument management, exchange, and clearing infra.
• Design and implement features across a distributed microservices stack.
• Develop customer-facing APIs using FIX, REST, and WebSocket.
• Build robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems using Kafka and Postgres.
• Collaborate with product stakeholders to translate requirements into technical solutions.
• Improve system performance, reliability, and maintainability.
• Participate in on-call rotations to troubleshoot production incidents.

Skills

Java

Distributed systems

Microservices

Low latency

REST APIs

WebSocket

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Financial markets

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/SE

Tools

Hydra

Aeron

REST

WebSocket

FIX

PostgreSQL

Kafka

JVM tuning

Job description

Location: Chicago, IL (or New York, NY) – Hybrid

Full-time

Our client is seeking a senior engineer who will help drive the development of their cloud based scalable architecture that powers their 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.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the technical design and architecture of their 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.
• Experience with Hydra, Aeron or other low latency messaging frameworks is a strong plus.
• 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.