Sr. Software Engineer — Low -Latency C++ Trading Systems

About This Opportunity

CTI  Staffing is partnering with a leading financial services organization to find a Senior Software Engineer for their electronic trading platforms team, based onsite in Jersey City, NJ.

This team builds low-latency, high-throughput trading infrastructure that powers mission-critical capital markets workflows. You'll be a hands-on senior contributor designing and tuning distributed, event-driven systems where microseconds matter — and where the engineering directly impacts trade execution at scale. This is a role for someone who loves the hard performance problems and wants to own them.

What You'll Do

• Architect and develop distributed, event-driven systems optimized for low latency and high throughput
  


• Build and tune high-performance C++ components on Linux
  


• Implement asynchronous processing and resilient messaging using UNIX IPC mechanisms
  


• Diagnose and resolve performance, scalability, and resilience bottlenecks across the platform
  


• Work with real-time market data feeds and trading workflows end to end
  


• Mentor engineers and promote performance-engineering best practices
  


• Support production systems, including participation in a weekly on-call rotation
  


• Collaborate across teams to deliver seamless, end-to-end trading solutions
  

Requirements

What You Bring

Must-Have:

• 8+ years of hands-on software design and development, with deep production C++ on Linux
  


• Strong command of UNIX IPC mechanisms (shared memory, sockets, message queues)
  


• Proficient shell scripting in a Linux/UNIX environment
  


• Experience working with real-time market data or comparable latency-sensitive data systems
  


• Proven ability to build scalable, distributed, asynchronous, event-driven applications
  


• Hands-on performance tuning and low-latency design patterns
  


• Willingness to work onsite 5 days/week and participate in an on-call rotation
  

Nice-to-Have:

• FIX protocol and FIX engine experience
  


• Low-latency messaging exposure (e.g., Kafka, 29West)
  


• Capital markets / trading platform or order management background
  


• Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (Git, Maven, Jenkins, Artifactory)
  


• Exposure to AI developer-assist tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot)
  

Technical Environment:

• C++, Linux/UNIX, shell scripting
  


• Distributed, event-driven, low-latency systems
  


• Real-time market data pipelines
  


• Messaging frameworks and IPC
  

What Success Looks Like:

• Independently owning and optimizing core platform components within the first 3–6 months
  


• Measurably improving latency or throughput on a critical workflow
  


• Contributing reliably to production stability and on-call rotation