Senior Engineering Specialist (Low Latency)

Rothera; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) plan with employer match

Health insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

A leading financial technology firm in Chicago is seeking a Senior Engineer to develop its high-throughput matching engine and clearing system. This role requires 5+ years of experience in building high-performance distributed systems, strong Java skills, and familiarity with networking protocols. The position offers a competitive salary of $150,000-$175,000 and a range of benefits including health insurance and a 401(k) plan. Join a mission-driven company dedicated to innovation and inclusivity.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Experience with low latency messaging frameworks is a plus.
• Understanding of concurrency and performance optimization.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the technical design and architecture of core infrastructure.
• Design and implement features within the matching engine.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate requirements into technical implementations.

Skills

Java proficiency

High-performance distributed systems

Network protocols and APIs

Kafka

Microservices

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

Tools

Aeron

Hydra

PostgreSQL

Job description

Overview

Build the market that brings the future into focus. Rothera is building a world-changing prediction market in partnership with some of the financial industry's leading global brokerage and trading firms. By empowering traders to take positions on the events that shape our world, Rothera's platform harnesses the scale and power of financial markets to produce timely, unique, and effective information discovery for leaders and decision makers to ask and answer their most important questions. Rothera operates at the frontier, generating market-driven forecasts that turn intuition into insight.

About The Role

As a Senior Engineer you will assist in the development of our high-throughput matching engine and clearing system. 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 high-performance systems, and can deliver production-quality code that operates at scale with reliability and precision.

What you'll do

• Contribute to the technical design and architecture of Rothera's core exchange and clearing infrastructure, collaborating with other engineers on system design decisions.
• Design and implement significant features and components within the matching engine, order management systems and clearing workflows.
• Utilize Aeron and Hydra frameworks to build ultra-low-latency and high-throughput messaging architectures that power the core of our infrastructure.
• 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 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.

Benefits & Compensation

This position has a base salary of $150,000-$175,000 per year.

Rothera Markets is dedicated to advancing the careers and personal wellbeing of our team members. We are continuously exploring ways to support our employees holistically, including a 401(k) plan with employer match, health, vision, and dental insurance for employees and eligible dependents, paid time off, and much more.

Why you should join the mission

If you want a critical role in a path-breaking company, you belong here.

Rothera values initiative from individuals of all backgrounds. We are proud to be an inclusive workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, age, disability or handicap, sex, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

This is a full-time, in-person hybrid position and is not available for visa sponsorship.