Senior Software Engineer, Core

P2P; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Talos is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join the Core team in New York, NY. You will focus on building and maintaining the foundational platform infrastructure that powers the entire Talos trading ecosystem, which includes developing low-latency messaging systems and API layers.

This role requires expertise in backend engineering and distributed systems, as you will tackle complex problems at the intersection of financial protocols and infrastructure reliability, ensuring high-performance and low-latency for trading workflows.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of systems-level fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain foundational platform infrastructure.
• Develop low-latency messaging systems and API layers.
• Solve distributed systems problems for trading workflows.

Skills

Backend engineering experience with Go, C++, Java, Rust

Distributed systems design and deployment

Concurrency primitives and I/O models

Low-latency messaging frameworks

API design and implementation

Job description

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with deep proficiency in Go, C++, Java, Rust or similar systems languages
• Demonstrated ownership of large-scale distributed systems, from initial design through deployment, scaling, and long-term operations
• Strong systems-level fundamentals: concurrency primitives, memory layout, I/O models, database design, network protocols, and the performance implications of each
• Experience designing systems with stringent correctness guarantees — ordering, consistency, durability — not just ones that work under normal conditions
• Own projects end-to-end: take work from problem definition through design, implementation, and rollout, and see it through to completion without needing to be chased
• Track record of leading technical decisions: navigating ambiguity, defining architecture, making meaningful trade-offs, and bringing a team along on the reasoning
• Comfortable operating at multiple levels of abstraction, from API contract design down to diagnosing latency spikes at the socket or disk layer
• (Desirable) Experience with Aeron or comparable low-latency messaging frameworks (e.g., Chronicle, LMAX Disruptor, ZeroMQ)
• (Desirable) Hands-on experience building geo-distributed or multi-site systems with active-active replication and regional failover
• (Desirable) Familiarity with FIX protocol (4.x/5.x) or other structured financial messaging formats
• (Desirable) Background in trading infrastructure, market data systems, or other latency-sensitive financial platforms
• (Desirable) Experience with sequencer design, write-ahead logging, or custom persistence engines

What the job involves

• Talos is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to join the Core team, focused on building and maintaining the foundational platform infrastructure that powers the entire Talos trading ecosystem
• This role centers on high-performance, distributed systems engineering: designing low-latency messaging infrastructure using Aeron, building and evolving the API layers (FIX, WebSocket, REST) consumed by product teams across the firm, and maintaining the sequencer and market data distribution pipelines that sit at the heart of Talos’ architecture
• You will work on deeply technical problems at the intersection of distributed systems, financial protocols, and infrastructure reliability
• This is an opportunity to go deep on platform craft — shaping the infrastructure that every team at Talos builds on, and solving problems where the margin for error is low and the design space is wide open
• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance platform services including API gateways (FIX, WebSocket, REST), and the core libraries that product teams across Talos build on
• Build and evolve Aeron-based messaging infrastructure for reliable, low-latency communication
• Tackle hard distributed systems problems end-to-end: ordering and determinism guarantees, zero-downtime deployments, active-active architectures spanning cloud regions, and crash-consistent recovery
• Work cross-functionally to ensure platform primitives meet the throughput and latency requirements of real-time trading workflows, including market data distribution at scale
• Provide product teams with reusable service infrastructure to build scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient services