Staff Frontend Engineer - Real-Time Charting Engine

Topstep; United States; Remote; USD 200,000 - 225,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Company-paid holidays

Family leave

401(k) with company match

Health, dental, vision insurance

Job summary

Topstep is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build a custom charting engine for the TopstepX trading platform. You will own a framework-agnostic core library and the React bindings, delivering a performant, API-first visualization framework used across web and mobile platforms.

You will mentor engineers, shape rendering performance, and drive architecture decisions for a scalable, cross-device UI. This role emphasizes production-grade charting systems and collaborations with platform teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of frontend engineering experience building and shipping production systems.
• Prior experience building or contributing to a production charting library, data visualization framework, or comparable interactive rendering system.
• Working knowledge of financial markets — OHLCV, tick data, and futures conventions.
• Deep proficiency in TypeScript including strict mode, advanced generics, and designing public APIs that other engineers consume.
• Deep proficiency in React, including production experience designing component libraries, hooks APIs, or framework binding layers.
• Production experience with frontend graphics rendering, particularly Canvas 2D — multi-layer compositing, dirty-region rendering, and text metrics.
• Demonstrated performance discipline for 60fps real-time rendering with profiler fluency.
• Production experience with Web Workers and SharedArrayBuffer — zero-copy data pipelines, typed-array views, and off-main-thread compute architecture.
• 2D math fluency — coordinate transforms and hit testing.
• Track record of architecting libraries with public APIs that consumers integrate against without leaking implementation details.
• Discipline around visual testing — pixel diffing and deterministic replay-based tests.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core systems of the charting engine — rendering primitives and domain features.
• Own the framework-agnostic core library architecture, including the public API for React, React Native, and direct consumers.
• Build and maintain the React binding — a thin wrapper adapting the core public API to framework-native components.
• Drive architectural decisions on canvas compositing, layer strategy, and main-thread vs. worker-thread boundaries.
• Define and uphold rendering performance standards across the engine — 60fps and responsive interactions under continuous data flow.
• Build the data integration layer bridging real-time data pipelines into the charting engine.
• Ensure charting engine is consistent and performant across devices.
• Establish visual testing standards including pixel diffing and golden-image regression.
• Lead architectural reviews and RFCs for the charting library and guide cross-team alignment.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews and technical coaching.
• Balance technical debt with feature delivery based on long-term library health.
• Communicate technical direction and trade-offs clearly to peers and leadership.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Canvas 2D rendering

Web Workers

Public API design

2D math

Performance profiling

Tools

WebGL2

Protobuf

MessagePack

Rust + WASM

Job description

Topstep is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to build a custom charting engine for the TopstepX trading platform. You will own a framework-agnostic core library and the React bindings, delivering a performant, API-first visualization framework used across web and mobile platforms.

You will mentor engineers, shape rendering performance, and drive architecture decisions for a scalable, cross-device UI. This role emphasizes production-grade charting systems and collaborations with platform teams.