Principal Software Engineer

Global X ETFs; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 245,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work flexibility

401(k) match

Wellness programs

Life and disability insurance

Employee assistance program (EAP)

Job summary

Global X ETFs is hiring a founding engineer to build and own the firm's proprietary investment platform, including a Java service tier and Python analytics tier on AWS. The role focuses on real-time data, deterministic replay, and end-to-end ownership of production services.

You will collaborate with traders, portfolio managers, and operations while advancing AI-native engineering practices and scalable architectures across multiple markets and time zones.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production backend services.
• Experience with distributed, fault-tolerant systems and back-pressure handling.
• Expertise in Java (Spring Boot) and Python in production.
• Familiarity with agentic coding tools and AI-assisted development.
• Cloud-native engineering on AWS with containers and IaC.
• Strong written communication and ability to own end-to-end systems.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate containerized services on AWS in Java and Python.
• Ensure continuous operation with graceful degradation under partial failures.
• Implement idempotent, exactly-once semantics for external systems of record.
• Create event-sourced audit trails and deterministic replay capabilities.
• Shape APIs around user workflows with state, undo, and reusability.
• Collaborate with portfolio managers, traders, and ops to align on workflows.

Skills

8+ years experience

Distributed systems

Java

Python

AWS

Agentic tooling

Communication

Tools

AWS

Spring Boot

Job description

Role Summary

We are hiring a founding engineer for the firm's proprietary investment platform — in effect, the operating system for our trading and portfolio management desks. Global X operates a large and growing ETF platform across multiple markets. Our investment desk runs on proprietary technology built in-house for portfolio management, trading, and the operational workflow around them, and we are investing significantly in advancing it as the product range and the number of markets grow.

The engineering problems here are genuinely interesting ones. Real-time market data under back-pressure. Sub-second recalculation across a continuously changing book. Idempotent posting to external systems of record, where a duplicate or dropped message has direct financial consequences. Deterministic replay from an immutable event log. Multiple markets, calendars, and time zones. And a correctness standard set by a regulated business rather than by convenience.

This role will own services end to end — design, implementation, deployment, and production — across a Java service tier and a Python quantitative tier on AWS. The decisions you make here shape the platform for years and set the engineering standard for the team that grows around it.

Agentic coding tools are core to how we work, and AI is core to what we are building: the platform is designed so that agents are first-class participants in it rather than a capability layered on afterward. If you have been looking for a role where the scope is wide, the problems are hard, and the tooling keeps up with your ambition, this is that role.

Key Responsibilities

• Platform & Distributed Systems Engineering

  • Design, build, and operate containerized services on AWS across a Java service tier and a Python analytical tier, owning them in production and in development.
  • Build for continuous operation through partial failure. A market data feed drops, a counterparty is unreachable, a batch arrives late — the platform degrades in defined, observable ways rather than stopping, because the desk depends on it every trading day.
  • Design idempotent, exactly-once semantics wherever the platform posts to external systems of record, and keep the real-time calculation path fast under continuous change, with heavier analytical work off the critical path.
  • Implement the event-sourced audit trail and immutability guarantees that let any calculated value or user action be reconstructed exactly, and make deterministic replay a system property rather than an aspiration.
  • Shape APIs around the workflows users actually perform, with step-wise state, reversibility, and undo as first-class capabilities.
  • Build for multiple markets, calendars, and time zones. The desks this platform serves do not all trade the same hours, and the design should not assume they do.

• AI-Native Engineering

  • Build the platform so AI agents are first-class participants — structured context, explicit action boundaries, and provenance on every state change, treated as cross-cutting infrastructure alongside logging and observability rather than as a feature.
  • Use agentic coding tools as a primary instrument of delivery. We scope ambitiously because of them, and we would rather give a strong engineer more surface area than more process.
  • Own the harness as well as the output: steering documents, specifications, test fixtures, and evaluation criteria that make agents genuinely productive on this codebase rather than generically capable.
  • Raise the review bar to match. When generation is cheap, verification is where craft lives, and correctness, security, and maintainability remain yours.
  • Track the tooling frontier and tell us when it moves. Work that took a week last quarter may not this quarter, and we want a team that notices and re-plans rather than continuing out of habit.

• Domain & Stakeholder Partnership

  • Work directly with portfolio managers, traders, operations, and compliance to understand the investment workflow in depth, then translate it into service boundaries and API contracts.
  • Hold the line on numerical correctness, with validation rigorous enough that results can be relied on without a second opinion.
  • Partner with the desk through each stage of delivery: investigate differences, separate genuine defects from expected variation, and drive them to resolution.

• Foundation & Growth

  • Set the standard for testing, CI/CD, observability, and secrets hygiene in a regulated environment where audit evidence is a deliverable in its own right.
  • Contribute architecture decision records, and leave a codebase legible to both the engineers and the agents that work on it next.
  • Help shape how the engineering function scales — hiring, standards, mentorship, and the operating model — as the team expands around the platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production backend services, including ownership of systems where failure had real consequences.
• Deep experience with distributed, fault-tolerant systems: event-driven architectures, idempotency and delivery guarantees, back-pressure, graceful degradation, and the failure modes that only appear in production.
• Expert Java (modern LTS releases, Spring Boot) and strong production Python, and comfortable moving between the two rather than specializing in one.
• Agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or equivalent) as part of your daily production work. We are interested in how you use them — where they accelerate you, where they mislead, and how you verify.
• Cloud-native engineering on AWS: containerized compute, relational data, caching, queueing and eventing, and infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience in a domain where correctness was non-negotiable — financial calculation, accounting, billing, or similar — with the testing discipline that implies.
• A track record of owning systems end to end and of setting technical direction others follow.
• Strong written communication. Specifications and design documents are load-bearing here, for the humans and for the tooling.

Nice to Have

• Buy-side or asset management domain: positions and holdings, transactions, corporate actions, benchmarks and index data, NAV, and the order lifecycle. ETF or 1940-Act fund experience is a strong plus.
• Real-time market data and execution vendor integration (Bloomberg, FactSet, or equivalents); FIX protocol experience.
• Building or consuming MCP servers, tool interfaces, or other agent-facing surfaces over production systems.
• Spec-driven development workflows and maintaining agent steering documentation across a multi-service codebase.
• Cross-language service interop; cloud data warehouse and distributed cache technologies.
• Engineering in a regulated environment: SEC record keeping (Rule 204-2), Regulation S-P, SOC 1 controls, and the evidentiary questions raised by AI-assisted change.

Compensation Range

• $230,000-$245,000 plus annual bonus

Global X does not accept unsolicited resumes or candidate profiles from recruitment agencies, search firms, or third-party recruiters.

Compensation & Benefits

Global X offers a competitive total compensation package, including base salary, annual performance bonus, and a comprehensive benefits program:

• Competitive base salary with annual performance-based bonus
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching
• Generous paid time off and company holidays
• Professional development and continuing education opportunities
• Hybrid work flexibility
• Life and disability insurance
• Wellness programs and employee assistance program (EAP)

About Global X

Global X was founded in 2008. For more than fifteen years, our mission has been empowering investors with unexplored and intelligent solutions. Our product lineup features a wide range of ETF strategies and $78.1 billion in assets under management. While we are distinguished for our Thematic Growth, Income, and International Access ETFs, we also offer Core and other funds to suit a wide range of investment objectives. Explore our ETFs, research and insights, and more at www.globalxetfs.com.

Global X is a member of Mirae Asset Financial Group (“Mirae Asset”), a global leader in financial services, with $803 billion in assets under management worldwide. Mirae Asset has an extensive global ETF platform ranging across the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.